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Comment by donalhunt | Hacker News Reader

Nitpick: The name of the country is "Ireland". :)

People (in the UK at least) often distinguish between the republic, the island and Northern Ireland by prefixing with "Republic of". So I don't really understand what your point is because nowhere in the article does it claim the official name of the Republic of Ireland is the Republic of Ireland. By your logic every time someone wrote an article referencing "the UK", it would be appropriate to reply "do you mean the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, because that's its actual name!"

Only colloquially. The official name includes "The Republic of".

I think it's important to make that distinction here because "Ireland" can also sometimes refer to the whole island.

Incorrect.

From article 4 of the Constitution: "The name of the State is Éire, or, in the English language, Ireland."

I'm not from Ireland but apparently in 1948 they declared that the name of the state should officially be "Republic of Ireland" and did not amend the constitution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_Irish_state

http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1948/act/22/section/2/ena...

No, they declared "Republic of Ireland" to be an official _description_, not the official name. The name is specified near the beginning of the constitution as Éire, or in the English language, Ireland [1], in article 4, and would require an amendment to change. And while we do them way more often than the US does, we haven't done one for this topic.

1: https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/d5bd8c-constitution-of-ire...

Thats about United Kingdom, but Ireland is mentioned https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10

Wikipedia seems to think you are both right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Ireland#Name

Using "Republic of Ireland" is useful when distinguishing between the island and the state.

Wikipedia says "also known as" which does a lot of heavy lifting. It's known as that externally because of UK government policy in the early days of the nation. This was because they felt recognising the name of the country as Ireland would be recognising claims over Northern Ireland. Other UK variations such as "the Irish Republic", "the Irish Free State" and "Eire" (no fada, in the English language, which is unfortunate as in the Irish language dropping the fada makes it the word for burden) stuck less elsewhere. Since the good friday agreement the UK government has dropped that refusal and similarly the Irish government has used the "and Northern Ireland" bit of the UK's full name.

The one Irish national entity to use the name Republic of Ireland is the football team, which does so as a result of a FIFA ruling as the Northern Ireland football team was the defacto successor of the pre independence football team so kept the name Ireland until FIFA insisted on the disambiguating names.

Look, in a informal context nobody is going to bite your head off for getting it wrong. It's not at the level of going around Zimbabwe talking about Rhodesia, both due to the lower phonetic distance and subsequent outcomes for both countries after British rule, but it comes from the same place. Which is why just this week the normally soft spoken President of Ireland was issuing a rebuke to the DUP for rendering his title as "President of the Republic of Ireland" in the context of a diplomatic dispute. Because it's just not the name of the country.

As an Irish person: you and all other people commenting underneath are wasting your time. No one cares. Ireland or Republic of Ireland.

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