Votes all round on changing town names?
IT has always puzzled me why many towns and villages throughout Sligo can have at l east two different spelli ngs. At last, there seems to be some clarity emerging and one community is prepared to take action to assert one uniform spelling it town.
On Monday last at a meeting of the Ballymote and Tubbercurry Municipal District it emerged that the people of Enniscrone was their town name to be spelt just like that and not Inishcrone which appears on local authority signage.
The local development association has devoted much research and time to the topic and the general consensus is that Inishcrone will be consigned to history but that it could take awhile for this to happen.
For me, and probably most, it has always been a case of spelling the west Sligo resort, Enniscrone but somehow Inishcrone persisted in some quarters.
According to council official, Tom Brennan, the local authority went by the names on ordinance survey maps when choosing the spelling for signs.
Director of Services Dorothy Clarke told the meeting that the council was supportive of the change to Enniscrone and it had already taken legal advice.
And, it’s not straightforward. The Environment Minister will need to be consulted but there’s also a place names commission to have their say too.
A name change will also require the support of the councillors and a local vote on the issue will have to be held.
There will be costs involvled in the chnage too, mainly the signage. Local councillor, Joe Queenan said there was a lot of confusion in the area over the spelling but locals always felt it should be spelt with an ‘E’ not an ‘I’. Cllr Michael Clarke said it was a case of the locals getting it right and officialdom wrong. “What we’re doing is putting it right,” he said.
And Sligo is littered with other town and village place names spelt differently on official signage. There’s Easky and Easkey, Ballysadare and Ballisodare, Drumcliffe and Drumcliff, Rathcormack and Rathcormac, Gorteen and Gurteen and Tobercurry and Tubbercurry.
It may well happen that there could be several votes and legal processes to go though in each of the above villages and towns in order to officially have one uniform spelling.
It does seem an odd situation at present there’s such a wide variance between official and common use spellings.