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What’s in a name?



Tory...

Even saying the word! As it comes out of my mouth, my lip curls in reflexive derision; my nose wrinkles like someone’s passed a fresh stool under it and it takes all my will to resist the almost Tourettes-like urge to add a crude, shouted sexual swear word. (Believe me, I’m still thinking it.)
Funny word. If you grew up in the west of Ireland, Tory was as likely to be an island off the Bloody Foreland in Donegal  as it was to be a sobriquet for the Conservative and Unionist Party. And certainly as a youngster I did at least once mix the two up with moderately amusing consequences. (Youthful confusion: to this day, the Croppy has never lived down the fact that as a seven year old, he evinced bitter disappointment on not seeing a single gondola while passing through Ennis.)
But what is in a name? Well, quite a lot as it goes in the case of ‘Tory’ (w**ker!..pardon me). There’s an etymology here that’s quite ticklish. (Bear in mind however that I’m the kind of person who gets their kicks telling Loyalists that the Pope had a Te Deum mass of thanks sung for King Billy’s 1690 victory at the Boyne.)
Edifyingly, the word Tory actually derives from the Middle Irish word tóraidhe; modern Irish tóraí: outlaw, robber....
The name later applied as a Cromwellian term of abuse to Confederates or Royalists in arms before being adopted from 1678 as a political label for the Royalist traditionalist faction until the Tories became the Conseravative Party in 1832.
Tory: from Irish robbers and rebels to pillars of the British Establishment in less than two hundred years...Which brings me neatly on to the meaning of 'Sinn Féin'....
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