Ireland

Ireland was the first European country to use hereditary surnames. By the early eleventh century the great Gaelic dynasties were already passing surnames down — from grandfather, in the older Ó form, or from father, in the Mac form. Ó Néillmeans ‘descendant of Niall’ — Niall Glúndubh, king of Tara, killed in 919. Mac Cárthaighmeans ‘son of Cárthach’ — Cárthach son of Saerbrethach, king of Eóganacht Caisil, who died around 1045. The surnames froze on the men who carried them at that moment, and every descendant has worn the same name since.

The Anglo-Normans arrived in 1169 and brought a parallel tradition. Fitz — from fils, ‘son of’ in Norman French — produced Fitzgerald, Fitzpatrick, Fitzgibbon. The de Burgo line became Burke; le Waleys became Walsh; de Brún became Browne. Within four generations the great Norman families were speaking Irish, marrying into the Gaelic houses, and being addressed as ‘Mac William Burke’ — half Irish surname, half Norman one.

The Plantations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought a third layer. Lowland Scots into Ulster after 1610. Cromwellian veterans into the midlands and Munster after 1652. The Williamite confiscations of 1691. Surnames like Hamilton, Stewart, Johnston, Wilson sit on Ulster ground today as long as the McCanns and the Maguires.

The Penal Laws of 1695–1829 set out, among many other things, to dismantle the public Catholic and Gaelic identity of the Irish — and the Ó and Mac prefixes became a quiet liability for any family doing business under the Protestant Ascendancy. Across the eighteenth century an enormous proportion of Irish families set the prefixes aside: Ó Súilleabháin became simply Sullivan, Mac Cárthaigh became Carthy, Ó Briain became Brien. The prefixes were not lost — they were put down. The Gaelic Revival of the 1880s and 1890s picked them back up: Douglas Hyde and the Gaelic League made the Ó and the Mac respectable in print again at the same moment the Land League made the Catholic Irish farmer respectable in politics. By 1900 the prefixes were coming back into ordinary use; by 1922 a generation of schoolchildren in the new Free State were writing them as a matter of course.

Then the diaspora. The Famine emigration of 1845–1852 took a million Irish to North America in seven years; the same number again over the half-century that followed. By 1900 there were five times more Irish people overseas than at home. The names travelled with them, but the receiving registries — clerks at Liverpool, at Castle Garden and Ellis Island, at Sydney's Circular Quay — wrote what their typewriters and their ears could manage. The fada over the Ó became an apostrophe; the apostrophe was very often dropped entirely; Mac was simplified to Mc; the more elaborate Gaelic spellings were Anglicised under the same daily assimilative pressures that operated in the schoolyard and the workplace. The diaspora forms — O'Brien, O'Connor, O'Sullivan, McCarthy — are the survivors of that process. The names that came through are the proof of how hard they were held on to.