Mitchel the man versus Mitchels the place...

MITCHELS Court, Mitchels Avenue, Mitchels Road, Mitchels Crescent and John Mitchels GAA Club are embedded in the soul of the people who live there – past and present. Whether or not a time comes when place names are changed because of their negative associations with the past is as yet unclear. But the debate has at least arrived because of recent racial tensions in the US, which have galvanised the entire western world.

One man totally opposed to notions of changing place names in Boherbee is Fianna Fáil Cllr Johnnie Wall. A past player and committee member with John Mitchels GAA, Cllr Wall was ‘born and bred’ in Mitchels Crescent where, he states, people there were not unaccustomed to dealing with prejudice in their own lives.

“If you’re talking about segregation, we were segregated in the Crescent for years. That part of town was considered ‘undesirable’ and I won’t say what we were called by people when we were playing football,” Cllr Wall said.

He added that people from the Mitchel’s part of Tralee are ‘very proud’ of their address and where they come from.

“The Mitchels are a very proud people. They come from a part of town named after Mitchel, you can’t change that no matter what you think of Mitchel. His name was taken for what he did for this country, which was enormous. That’s not to downplay his role in racism, which is appalling. But he was honoured for what he did for Ireland. I couldn’t see anyone wanting to change that,” he said.

Controversy over John Mitchel’s links to pro-slavery in the antebellum South has created a tsunami of controversy for GAA clubs, of which there are roughly 14 between Ireland and the UK carrying Mitchel’s name.

Mitchel believed in slavery and spoke of African Americans as an ‘innately inferior people’. Mitchel even had three sons who fought for the pro-slavery Confederacy in the Civil War, two of which died.

In Mitchel’s nationalist writings, he spoke of the need to invoke a common bond between Catholic, Protestant, and Dissenter. It’s unfortunate this didn’t extend to people of colour. But none of this is linked to the people of Boherbee and the John Mitchels GAA Club. Mitchel’s name is part of locality, identity and a ‘sense of place’ in Tralee. Severing Mitchel’s name from present-day culture in Tralee is to sever generations of cultural identity that has outgrown Mitchel himself and come to symbolise something far superior than Mitchel’s narrow and shameful views on slavery, which is solidarity and community pride.

In many ways, ‘identity’ surrounding the name John Mitchel no longer belongs to the historic figure. Pride in the John Mitchels area of Tralee, and its GAA club, is a generational attachment – it belongs to the people who forged their own identity, a point that makes the club’s recent refusal to talk about the controversy with The Kerryman all the more disappointing.

Cllr Wall concludes; “It’s (Mitchels) a part of our town that is embedded in town history. People that come from there are proud to be called ‘Mitchels people’. We’re not honouring him for what he did in America. This has been lost slightly in the sense they’re trying to take away what he did for Ireland. “What he did in America was wrong, simple as that. But ‘the Mitchels’ is also a place people are very proud of, it has a strong neighbourhood and tradition.” Lastly, while history may have boomeranged John Mitchel’s name into the present by bringing uncomfortable truths to the fore, one certainty remains over 160 years after his involvement in the US Civil War and the fight for Irish Independence, which is there are two John Mitchels: Mitchel ‘the man’ and Mitchels ‘the place’. Overcoming this dilemma is likely to be