Maynooth, Ireland Begins Here
Great slogan. Maybe some town or county has already used it. I could see it being employed by Rosslare, Shannon, Belfast, Dublin, Dun Laoghaire, Cork. You get gist. Ports. On the edge, everywhere else you go is Ireland. So Ireland begins there.
How would you feel if a sign greeted you, as your bus sauntered through County Kildare, saying Maynooth, Ireland Begins Here? Especially if you were coming from the Galway side?
Topeka is the capital of the State of Kansas and the county seat of Shawnee County. By the quickest route on foot (or motor vehicle if you must kill our grandchildren’s inheritance with your pollution) Topeka is in the third county you come to from either the north, or the east. From the south it’s the fifth, and from the west, the twelfth.
Topeka is the Maynooth of Kansas, or possibly Navan, and it bugs me that they have chosen to say Topeka, Kansas Begins Here - because from where I’m sitting in Missouri, Kansas actually begins half a mile away, right beside the McDonald’s on State Line Road.
See Also:
• Beehive Huts in Kansas
• Visit The Aran Islands clean
• Mise Eire
Eolaí gan Fhéile:
Maynooth, Ireland Begins Here
Yeah. It always sounds a bit odd when people talk about Kansas, Missouri. It’s like London, France.
However, Dublin is definitely Ireland. The other two-thirds of us live “down the country”.
I always struggle with people who say that certain parts of Ireland are “the real Ireland”. This is a view I’ve heard expressed mostly here in the US, but also in Dublin by people from Connacht.
Also, I realise based on context that many Irish people are referring to KC when they say just “Kansas”, but “City” is not a descriptive qualification like with Dublin or Cork; it’s part of the city’s name - you never drop it.
To talk about the city you would therefore say “The city of Kansas City”. When you say just “Kansas” in these parts (Kansas City, Missouri) you are referring to either the entire state of Kansas next door, or more typically to those parts of the metro area (what in Ireland we’d probably call Greater Kansas City) that are on the Kansas side - which is actually a group of little Dun Laoghaires if you will.
In my next lesson I’ll move on to the subjects of:
1) Kansas City, Kansas aka KCK
2) Kansas, Oklahoma aka “Little Kansas”
3) North Kansas City and Kansas City North (where one is Lesotho and the other is South Africa)