O'HIGGINS may be a comparatively rare name in Co Roscommon or around the Ring of Kerry. But it is a name you cannot get away from here in Chile.
The main thoroughfare of this capital of five million people is named after the national hero of the last century, the Liberator General Bernardo O'Higgins.
The Liberator was the bastard son of Ambrose or Ambrosio, a clever man from Sligo who, from being an emigrant draper, rose in the service of the king of Spain to become viceroy of Peru.
Opposite the presidential palace in Santiago, reconstructed from the ashes after being burned down in General Pinochet's military putsch of September 1973, an eternal flame flickers over Bernardo's grave. It is surmounted by a statue of the national hero on a fiery steed.
His image is found on the currency and you can keep your share of that currency in the Banco O'Higgins.
Or you can spend it on an O'Higgins ticket for a bus which will take you to the Parque O'Higgins where you can stroll and feed the ducks. There are few O'Higginses in the telephone book, certainly nothing to compare with the long column of O'Ryans with names like Ximena. But those who can claim him among their ancestors are not slow in telling you.
Defeated Royalists
Bernardo O'Higgins is revered here because, at the beginning of the last century, he led the successful bid to rid the country of centuries of rule by Spain and transform it into an independent republic.
Spain's rule in Chile ended in 1818 when forces led by O'Higgins defeated the last royalists on the battlefield of Maipo, where the Spaniards left a thousand dead and their artillery.
The military hero went on to become Supreme Director (or dictator) of Chile, but later resigned and died in exile in Peru, the land his father had ruled for the House of Bourbon.
But the O'Higgins question in Chile is of much more than antiquarian or genealogical interest. It is a useful barometer of the present political pressure in Chile, says Dr Jose Miguel Pozo, a distinguished historian - who counts O'Higgins among his forebears.
One of the national hero's characteristics was an intense personal hatred of what passed at the time as Chile's aristocracy. That hatred was most probably, according to Dr Pozo, born of Bernardo's own sufferings as a boy.
Slighted the Rich
His clever father, the viceroy, ignored his illegitimate son whom he perhaps saw only once in his life. He packed him off to the country with his mother, and then sent him to England for studies.
Young Bernardo's letters to his father from his lodgings in Richmond, outside London, give ample testimony of the hurt the attitude of Ambrosio and the condescending attitudes of the rich caused him.
When he finally rose to power in Chile after the war, he got his own back, generally slighting the rich and puncturing their posturing by outlawing titles of nobility. By the lights of that time he did his best for the common man.
Perhaps his highest service to the nation was to resign rather than risk a civil war. Political leadership in Chile passed to a man called Diego Portales, who was a conservative to the marrow.
The treatment of has therefore presented problems to General Augusto Pinochet, who seized power in a bloody coup and who at 80 years of age still remains in a position of power as commander in chief of the Chilean army.
To Pinochet, who was responsible for the eradication of democratic government, for the death of President Salvador Allende, the people's choice of leader, and for the introduction of a regime which favoured the rich, O'Higgins was an obvious embarrassment.
The Liberator, with his support of the common man and his choice of resignation for the common good, was not a good, symbol for Pinochet and the. New Order he tried to introduce in 1973.
"O'Higgins was too liberal a figure for Pinochet," says Professor John Lynch, formerly of the University of London.
O'Higgins Snubbed
Pinochet therefore went to commemorate Diego Poitales. He seized the tall, modern edifice erected for the UN Conference on Trade and Development, turned it into his headquarters, and renamed it Edificio Diego Portales. O'Higgins was snubbed.
But the short, barrel chested O'Higgins has remained a popular figure among a people who are often undemonstrative to the point of dourness.
As Pinochet fought to maintain some popularity in the country, he set up an eternal flame and had The Liberator's remains reburied under it. The idea was to blur his own doubtful accomplishments with the undoubted heroism of O'Higgins.
Pinochet starts his last year in power as army commander shamed by human rights scandals. His conversion to the cause of the Liberator does not seem to have done his waning popularity much good.
It came too late.