One of the smaller revelations of Blue Road, Sinead O’Shea’s fine documentary on Edna O’Brien, was that its subject was the first-ever panellist to speak on the long-running BBC series Question Time.
That was September 1979, just before Pope John Paul II’s trip to Ireland, and an audience member with a clipped, Joyce Grenfell accent (now extinct) asked the panel if “a visit to Ulster” would help. Whereupon chairman Robin Day passed the question to O’Brien, as the resident Irish expert.
Her answer included an implicit history and geography lesson for British viewers. She agreed that, yes, it would help if the Pope visited “the North of Ireland”, thereby giving that euphemism its debut on the programme. Mind you, later in her reply, she also said “Ulster”, so BBC balance was maintained.
The documentary was more focused on another answer, to a more lighthearted question later. That concerned her ideas of what constituted an ideal companion, to which she joked that it would be someone who, among other things, would “not talk about his wife”.
The BBC’s national question: Frank McNally on Edna O’Brien and ‘the North of Ireland’
Dictionary on the Double – Frank McNally on the enduring literary life of Patrick Dinneen
‘This wonderful horse seems to have been as remarkable in death as in life’ – Frank McNally on an unbeatable stallion
‘Ireland, more than other countries, ought to be a country of trees’
This got a laugh from the audience although it may also have contained a veiled message for a British politician with whom she had a long-running and ultimately heartbreaking affair, and whom she only ever identified as “Lochinvar”.
Her nickname for him comes from an epic Walter Scott poem, which includes the lines: “So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war,/There never was a knight like the young Lochinvar.” Such were O’Brien’s feelings for the man that their affair prevented her writing for several years. But she vowed to take the secret of his real name to the grave and did. Nor is he identified in the documentary, although for those looking hard enough, there may be the odd hint.
On the “North of Ireland” issue, I suggest that this contentious phrase could be sublimated into an acronym, “NOI”, to minimise offence and save typing. The result would still hint at the speaker’s politics on the constitutional question. As a bonus, it would also evoke a Belfast accent. As in this sample political chant:
“What do we want”? (“Peace and Justice!”).
“When do we want it?” (“Noi!”)
In response to Friday’s diary, about how the great Irish lexicographer Patrick Dinneen (1860–1934) was a permanent fixture in the National Library for decades, being first in at 10am and always sitting at the same desk, reader Damien Maguire recalls a similar figure from his own days studying there in the 1970s.
The stranger used to arrive at the same time every morning, take the same reference book off the shelf, and sit at the same desk. But being in before him one day, and curious, Damien sought the book out and discovered it to be “an Irish-English dictionary”.
He still had it when the regular customer arrived: “In he came, shuffled along to his usual bookcase, reaching up for his daily dictionary, and there it was and it gone! There followed scenes of confusion and dismay and an indignant and distressed inquiry to the counter. Luckily, before the librarian came out to investigate, I had replaced the dictionary in its niche. Peace was restored.”
In the great Irish tradition of diminutives, from which we get maneen, priesteen, jackeen, and countless others, Damien suggests the mystery man was a “Dinneen-een”. Maybe. Or was it Dinneen’s ghost, obsessively proofreading his 1927 edition in purgatory?
Speaking of which, my temerity in correcting James Joyce’s spelling of Dinneen (he gives him a brief cameo in Ulysses as a two-n “Father Dineen”) has brought a rebuke from the lexicographer’s homeland, east Kerry.
Tim Brosnan writes that “as one of your most devoted readers, I am loath to chide you on or about any matter”. Then he chides away: “Regardless of what your sources may give you, the lexicographer’s name was Dineen – not Dinneen. The latter has crept into usage over the last few years from sources that should have known better. (You are not to blame).”
Tim’s email includes an oblique reference to my own benighted origins and suggests a trip to Kerry that would double as an education in spelling and pedology: “You should go down to his birthplace and see for yourself what ‘stony grey soil’ really looks like – and while there you will meet loads of Dineens, with not a Dinneen in sight.”
Well, Tim, loath as I am to chide a devoted reader – or indeed the entire population of Sliabh Luachra – I too must overcome this reluctance.
For before daring to correct Joyce, I consulted my own hardback copy of the famous dictionary, a 1965 reprint of the 1927 edition, bought in a second-hand bookshop recently for €30. And there, in gold print on the spine and again, in black, on the title page, it says “Dinneen”.
The book includes the lexicographer’s preface from 1927. Which is underwritten, interestingly, by a facsimile of his signature. There he gives himself as Gaeilge only: “Pádraig Ua Duinnín”.
And this I also call in evidence for the defence. Because, even if the 3-n “Dinneen” is now considered decadent in his native Kerry, I would argue that it reflects faithfully – to the Nth degree – the original Irish.
