In 1924, following several decades of lobbying and disputation, Dublin’s main thoroughfare was finally renamed O’Connell Street.
Like all such changes, the new name was a public affirmation of shifts in the cultural and civic consciousness of the city. Over the centuries, these alterations gradually result in streets, squares and landmark buildings whose names reflect the concerns of successive generations. Long-forgotten aristocrats, nationalist revolutionaries and artists who scandalised the audiences of their day all rub shoulders in a rich historical palimpsest. For those who use them daily, the origins of these names become obscure or invisible. Yet they still retain a historical heft.
This week’s announcement that the former Berkeley Library in Trinity College Dublin is to become the Eavan Boland Library is the latest example of this age-old process. The occasionally heated debate over whether 18th century philosopher George Berkeley’s name should be removed from the building was spurred by rising awareness of the history and legacy of colonialism and race-based chattel slavery.
Some argue that removing Berkeley’s name due to his advocacy of slavery and ownership of slaves is an ahistorical imposition of contemporary values on the complexities of the past. Others even believe it represents an erasure by social activists of the history of Western culture.
Such overwrought complaints are rather undercut by the fact that, far from being centuries old, the library was only named after Berkeley in 1978. Boland’s name seems a much more appropriate cultural reference point for this strikingly modernist building, a symbol of the parallel transformation of the university.
Despite the social changes of recent years, women remain grossly underrepresented in the State’s public realm. As historian Catriona Crowe notes, Boland’s “great achievement was to move women from the object (muse, dream, symbol) of poetry to the subject who was writing the poem”.
The new name, therefore, could hardly be more appropriate.