Maggie O’Farrell

speaker

1,785 appearances 8 recordings 7 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 14 Jun

Maggie O’Farrell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 7.

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The Book Show · How Maggie O'Farrell's inner 'neek' came out with Land · 14 Jun 2026 podcast

The British began mapping Ireland in the 1820s and it was for taxation purposes for a tax called the cess tax.

And even now in Ireland, there is a phrase where if you want to, it's a very polite way of saying something not very polite.

You say bad cess to you.

And that goes right back to that taxation, the name of the taxation.

So it was.

And initially the British decided they were not going to employ any Irish people at all on the maps.

which caused all endless problems because, of course, the language was a huge barrier and they couldn't ask people, who does this field belong to?

Where does the parish boundary end?

That was just impossible.

And, of course, all the place names, you see, are very complicated because it's a place that has had wave after wave of colonizers and people staking ownership.

And there were communities on one side of a mountain which had one name for the mountain and a community on the other which had a totally different name for the mountain.

So they realized...

not very far into the project that they had to employ some Irish people on it.

And so men like my

great great grandfather later and he was working on the second revision um they were the ones who you know they would arrive in a township or a barony and they'd have to set up a kind of a sort of headquarters and interview the locals about fields and boundaries and names and and it was people like my great great grandfather who had to act as a translator or to you know and i realized that actually mapping is such a complicated discipline it involves mathematics it involves

My kids, my teenagers now, they call me a neek.

I don't know if you know that name, Claire.

It's a cross-teen nerd and a geek.

Good.

I'm proud of it.

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