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I realise my name can seem a bit of a challenge for anyone who doesn’t have a smattering of Irish but names are important to the Irish. Our language was taken from us over centuries, place names as well as personal names lost any attachment to their original meaning. In English my name is McAteer, but it can also be brought into English as McTeer, McTear, McIntyre, McIntire, all approximations of the original phrase mac an tsaoir, son of the free man. The Irish for free is saor but in this context it is a very specific form of freedom. In mediaeval Ireland with it’s complex systems of chiefs and minor kings the ordinary man in the field paid certain taxes, or owed specific obligations, to any leader further up the chain. Makers though, people who worked wood or stone, were free from these obligation and formed a class outside the conventional structure. As close as my father’s generation my family were quarry men, still working stone. So for me the name Mac a’ tSaoir still has a resonance and a sense of purpose that McAteer has failed to bring into English with it.
Greag Mac a' tSaoir 