All-consuming for its editor, 'The Encyclopaedia of Ireland' aims to encompass the island in a single volume, writes Arminta Wallace
Never, they say, judge a book by its cover. You probably shouldn't judge a book by its weight, either, but one that weighs four kilograms is entitled to a certain amount of respect. This stately, plump tome, The Encyclopaedia Of Ireland, is, according to its publisher, Gill & Macmillan, the first compendium of all things Irish to be assembled in print. It took six years and cost €1 million to compile. Its 1,256 pages contain more than a million words, the entries under its 5,500 headwords covering history, literature, science, sport, engineering, politics, popular music - everything "from Abbeyknockmoy to Zozimus".
"You know the old thing about climbing Everest because it's there? We did it because it wasn't there," says the man who came up with the idea for the book, publishing director Fergal Tobin. "We noticed that single-volume, single-topic encyclopaedias were selling very well in other countries - and Ireland didn't have one." Which is odd, because Ireland is a particularly suitable topic. "You couldn't produce a one- volume book on France or Italy, obviously, because they're too big. Ireland is rich enough but at the same time small enough to encompass in one volume."
Leafing through the pages at random, you will learn that the county of Wicklow takes its name from the Norse Uíkar-ló, meaning "meadow of the bay", that 19th-century Blasket islanders often ate seabirds' eggs "though they gave the eater bad breath", that in his work De Mirabilibus Sacrae Scriptorum, the seventh-century author Augustine Eriugena listed the terrestrial mammals of the island, "solving the problem of how they reached the country after Noah's flood by proposing that Ireland had been cut off from the European continent by marine erosion".
The illustrations are a joy. Some are straightforward picture-postcard views, some black-and-white documentary reportage. But there are also plenty of unexpected images: members of Our Lady's Choral Society caught in a sudden squall during an outdoor performance of Handel's Messiah; the Epona instrument, Ireland's first space experiment, which flew to Halley's Comet in the late 1980s; Father Patrick Dineen, compiler of the famously quirky Foclóir Gaedhilge Agus Béarla of 1927.
Neil Hannon, also known as The Divine Comedy, has an entry, as do The Cranberries; Roy Keane is there, although not, such is the speed at which celebrity moves nowadays, Damien Duff.
You can get a good idea of the range and reach of the encyclopaedia by perusing its list of contributors. "Thomas Acton," it begins, "is professor of Romani studies at the University of Greenwich . . . " The first column alone contains Anders Ahlqvist, professor of Old and Middle Irish, Yahya al-Hussein, imam, and Éamonn Ansbro, director of Kingsland Observatory in Co Roscommon.
Ireland being Ireland, of course, many of the names are very familiar indeed, and perhaps only in circles as small as those in which Irish society moves would you get David Norris writing scholarly stuff on the history of homosexuality, then turning up as an entry in his own right.
It's worth pausing, though, to ask where you start when you set out to compile a book like this. "I spent about half a year looking at all Irish works of reference in print, combing the indices," says the encyclopaedia's general editor, Brian Lalor. "Then I composed a 5,000-heading skeleton index." At that point the 16 senior consultants, leading figures in the fields of history, science, literature, music, sociology and so on, were invited on board.
They, in turn, drew up lists of potential contributors. "X is told, 'We want 150 words on some 17th-century poet,' and they produce it. You're in business from that moment," says Lalor.
In theory it's simple: create your structure, appoint your people and let them at it. In practice, of course, simple is precisely what it isn't. Experts may know what they're on about, but they may not be particularly good at communicating it in 150 words - or even 10 times that many. "One person who shall be nameless was asked for 1,500 words on a topic and delivered 9,000," says Lalor with relish.
And "brilliant" ideas often aren't. "We began by marking out all the cross-references by hand on hard copy. Then somebody suggested it could all be done by computer." Computers are notoriously insensitive to nuance, so phrases such as "early modern" were picked up and cross-referenced, often as part of another phrase, occasionally wildly out of context. "We went through all the references with a fine comb, but it's a very dangerous business. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few howlers in there still," Lalor admits.
Unsurprisingly, Tobin says Gill & Macmillan would like to see a copy in every household in the country. As general editor Lalor says he aspired to generosity of spirit, inclusiveness and variety. "My feeling was that you shouldn't read through this book and say, oh God, more English literature or, oh, not more geography! I hope that there is such an extraordinary mix that you do not get pages and pages and pages of anything in particular.
"Also, the book is not a polemic. It is written from a position of confidence. In the past there was an assertion to be made about Irishness; we don't need to make that assertion now. And," he adds, "it includes the living as well as from now back to the Ice Age. And the living, of course, is the minefield."
Inevitably, as the process of compilation moved forward there was a great deal of refining, adjusting and sifting. But there was, he says, one major surprise. "I was very determined that the encyclopaedia would not be written from [University College Dublin's campus at\] Belfield. It had to be written from all corners, and that meant not writing about the North from the South. So we appointed consultants north of the Border as well as many contributors from around the world. There are contributors from 200 universities or institutions, all told. But we discovered that since 1922, particularly in the social sciences but in many other topics as well, scholars have not been writing about the whole island."
So a piece commissioned on, say, education would discuss only education in the Republic. Asked to amend it, the contributor would often argue that comparable statistics didn't exist. Sometimes, as in the case of education, this proved to be insurmountable. "I hadn't anticipated to what degree not thinking about the island as an island would affect almost every topic," says Lalor.
"That was a bit of an eye-opener, and I cannot say we entirely overcame it. But once we recognised it, sometimes all we had to do was send back the person's text and say, you know, excuse me, but . . . Lough Neagh? Large body of water?"
Bodies of water provide some of the encyclopaedia's most enjoyable moments, including a brace of pieces on fly-fishing by the novelist Colm O'Gaora and Joseph Brady's atmospheric miniature on the River Nore.
Commentators will no doubt have hours of fun arguing over the entries on political figures and the mini-essays on such topics as social class, public expenditure, bed and breakfast accommodation and sexuality. There are plenty of entries to treasure, not least an astringent note on the angelus by Lalor and a paragraph that celebrates the mother of all cows, Big Bertha.
Would it be correct to describe editing The Encyclopaedia Of Ireland as a labour of love for Lalor, whose interests encompass archaeology, printmaking, architecture and travel? "An ordeal would be more accurate, I think," he says. "During the latter part of the project my life was ruled by it. It was running through my mind all the time, no matter what I was supposed to be doing.
"On one occasion I woke up in the middle of the night with what I knew with absolute certainty was a vital piece of information. I went and got a sheet of paper, wrote the information on it and went back to sleep. I got up in the morning and there was the sheet of paper" - emblazoned with an unintelligible scribble. Beckett, Samuel (1906-1989), novelist, dramatist, and poet, would have loved it.
The Encyclopaedia Of Ireland is published by Gill & Macmillan on Tuesday, €65
What it says about George IV's footprints
On August 12th, 1821, King George IV, somewhat the worse for drink, disembarked from the steam packet Lightning at the west pier of Howth harbour on the north side of Dublin Bay, the first British monarch to visit Ireland since the arrival of the warring James II and William III, in 1689 and 1690, and the first one to do so peacefully.
To the cheers of a small group of bemused onlookers he planted his neat if unsteady feet on Irish soil. A local artist, Robert Campbell, traced the outline of the king's shoes on the granite boulder on which he was standing and subsequently carved their imprint into the rock, where they can still be seen at the end of the pier. (A plaque that commemorated the event has disappeared.) Meanwhile the lord lieutenant, Dublin Corporation and a crowd estimated at 20,000 were awaiting the king at Dunleary on the southern shore of the bay.
When George departed on September 3rd he bestowed on the latter village the honour of being called Kingstown, which it remained until the establishment of the Irish Free State, in 1922, when it reverted to its former name, but with revised spelling as Dún Laoghaire.
What it says about Benbulbin
An isolated part of the Cuilcagh plateau of Counties Sligo and Leitrim. Its towering limestone escarpments guard the coastal plain and Atlantic approaches of County Sligo. The plateau of Benbulbin exhibits classic karstic features, including limestone pavements; 136 plant species grow here, many being rare alpine varieties that found refuge on the plateau during the last glaciation.
On Benbulbin the legendary story of Diarmuid and Gráinne reached its climax when Fionn Mac Cumhaill, in revenge for losing Gráinne to Diarmuid, sent a magical boar to kill his competitor.
In nearby Drumcliff, St Colm Cille founded a monastery in the sixth century in repentance for his battle with St Finian over the ownership of pages copied from a psalter. The king, Diarmaid, adjudicated in Finian's favour, saying, "to every cow belongs her calf," and so established the law of copyright.
