A local councillor says there needs to be consistency around the naming of new housing developments in Irish.
Cllr Sean hArgáin spoke about the issue at yesterday’s Kilkenny City Municipal District meeting at County Hall.
The Labour councillor says there’s two estates in Kilkenny City spelt differently…
“I mean we have two estates, one of which is spelled B-A-U-N at the end of the estate and the other B-A-W-N. Now, in nobody’s lexicon is a spelt that way and I think people are well able to get their heads around a B-Á-N for a nice Irish language based name and I complimented the staff today with new housing where the old weather station was. My dad was a weatherman all his life and I’m delighted to see it called Teach Aimsíre, which is a really nice use of the Irish language.”
“Our neighbours down in Waterford, as you know yourself, have done a fantastic job. They have a very responsive committee with experts fighting from the outside in things like local folk, local place names and I appreciate lots of our local place names in Kilkenny, our old Norman names, their English names and that’s fine and we have to incorporate that but I really do think we should be including Irish language names as far as we possibly can and encouraging the use of that and getting them done appropriately and correctly and not just for our own estates but we should have the power to say to private developers, listen we want a decent name that’s appropriate to the area on private estates as well as public estates.”
