Belfield

I work in the library in University College Dublin, on the Belfield campus. (Its main campus is Belfield, though it also has a campus in Blackrock and various satellites in other places, even far abroad.)

Belfield is a large greenfield site. The architecture is sixties brutalist, there are lots of trees, several lakes, and a lot of statues. UCD moved here from the city centre in 1964. I've read that one of the biggest champions of the move was John Charles McQuaid, the Archbishop of Dublin, who has become a symbol of everything that is bad and reactionary in Catholic Ireland, but who won praise from many surprising quarters on individual issues.

Belfield is in Dublin 4, the most famous postcode in Dublin, which has been synonymous with the liberal intelligentsia for decades. (RTE, the national broadcaster, is also located there.)

There were various landed estates around Dublin 4 in the past. Belfield was one. Montrose (the plot of land on which RTE stands) was another.

Here's something I find very interesting. I have spent almost twenty-five years working in Belfield, and I've noticed that hardly anybody ever uses the name in Belfield itself.

You might not think that statement deserves italics, but I do.

Nobody ever talks about Belfield, only about UCD. Belfield is only ever really used in a historic context (the move to Belfield), or to distinguish between the Belfield campus and other parts of UCD.

Interstingly, people do use Montrose as a metonym (or stand-in) for RTE, nearly always in a snarky tone. But they don't use Belfield as a metonym for UCD.

How people use place-names is very interesting to me. For instance, it's fairly well-known that, after independence, various Irish placenames were changed for patriotic reason. Queen's County became Laois, and the harbour settlement of Kingstown became Dún Laoghaire (often pronounced Dunleary).

However, although Bagenalstown in Carlow had its name changed to Muine Bheag, the change never stuck. Nobody calls it Muine Bheag. Everybody calls it Bagenalstown. I've just read that there was a plebsicite to change it back in 1975. The "Yes" vote won comfortably, but there wasn't enough of a turnout to reach the threshold.

So why did all those other placenames change, but not Bagenalstown?

In a similar way, I've often wondered why, long after the West had been Christianized, the names of the days of week continued to honour pagan gods. Why was there no attempt to Christianize them, or indeed, to Christianize the months of the year?

I'm rather glad there wasn't. I like throwbacks. But it makes me curious.