When my daughter had a short spell in hospital recently, I was curious to discover that her patient wristband used ‘Tierney’ as her surname. While this moniker likely did a fine job of identifying her to staff, it was officially incorrect, according to her birth certificate.
People rarely call my daughters by their actual name. I don’t mean their first names…that’s the easy part. I mean their surname. This is because they have been burdened with a double-barrelled last name by their helplessly progressive parents.
Our experience has been that friends, family and bureaucrats often don’t bother using both last names. They sometimes, whether through inertia, convenience, absence of space or wanton patriarchy, use my surname only. So, what’s the point? Why do parents bother honouring both sides of the family, when even officialdom doesn’t reciprocate?
Dario Franceschini, a former government minister in Italy, recently proposed a change to birth registration in his country. He suggests that newborns should automatically be assigned their mothers’ surnames. While such a move would represent a major overhaul of patrilineal convention, he argues that it would be “compensation for a centuries-old injustice that has had not only a symbolic value, but has been a cultural and social source of gender inequality.”
Until relatively recently, the situation in Ireland was similar to the current setup in Italy. In fact, until 1997 a child wasn’t explicitly assigned a surname in Ireland, with the presumption being that they would take their father’s name. The advent of the Registration of Births Act changed this, requiring parents to designate either the mother’s, the father’s or both surnames. Yet, Signore Franceschini’s proposal gets to the heart of why my wife and I chose to double-barrel our children’s surname. It felt unfair and regressive to use only my name. Added to this, my wife is Brazilian and we wanted to recognise that aspect of our daughters’ identity and cultural heritage. While most expectant parents spend months agonising over their babies’ first names, we found the surname much more challenging. We worried that their names would end up being too complicated, considering they would be given Brazilian first names too.
I remember bumping into an old acquaintance after our eldest was born and coming face to face with this reality. He asked me the baby’s name. His response didn’t comply with the usual mix of “Aww” and “What a gorgeous name!” No. He simply said, mouth agape, “Well, that’s a mouthful, isn’t it?” The subtext was clear: “I see you’ve developed notions since I last saw you.”
He isn’t wrong, to be fair. Double-barrelled surnames, particularly in England, are associated with the aristocracy. Old families insisted on honouring both sides’ lineage. The reason why we have come to prioritise the father’s name more broadly is due to the coverture doctrine, which took hold in common law from the 16th century onwards. Coverture meant that wives became incorporated by their husbands, so that her name, property and legal status morphed into her spouse’s. Nowadays, many parents reject this unequal naming convention and double-barrelling offers a helpful solution.
However, despite my children’s surname masquerading as a liberal template, the patrilineal ethos remains. My surname comes first in the double-barrel and my wife’s is second. Did I insist on this because, deep down, I knew that people wouldn’t bother using both, and that the first name was most likely to survive? In the first season of Friends, the character of Ross Geller finds himself at the centre of a love triangle which is expecting a baby. Feeling that he is losing his grip on which surname will be assigned to the baby, he insists on a triple-barrelled option, with his name coming first. But his ex-wife’s girlfriend protests against his proposal of “Geller Willick Bunch”.
“He knows no one is going to say all those names,” she argues. “He knows they’ll wind up calling her Geller. Then he gets his way.”
Perhaps this is what has happened in my own situation. The positioning within the double-barrel is crucial, and may affect what name your child ends up being called in the reality of everyday life. There is sometimes an unnecessary apprehension with regard to how a child with a double-barrelled surname will manage if they marry in the future. Will they end up with a multi-barrelled surname?
There is an easy solution to this. In Spain, for example, individuals typically take their father’s first surname and their mother’s first surname only, thereby forgoing an ever more compounded multiplicity of appellations. Do I regret our decision to double-barrel? On the one hand, I’m glad that we have found a way to honour both sides of the family.
But on the other hand, it feels fragmented. I am sometimes concerned that we don’t all share the exact same surname. We worry when we travel because the kids have slightly different names to us on their passports. Could it raise eyebrows abroad, especially when child protection is so important? It’s harder to claim a child as yours when your names don’t mirror each other precisely.
It hasn’t been a problem so far, thankfully. The lived reality of assigning a double-barrelled name to our children has been unexpected. Almost everyone we meet assumes that our children’s surname is just mine. From birthday cards to hospital wristbands, the assumption rests on patriarchal tradition, despite our efforts to depart from this. The only way I can see this changing is once the children get old enough to take personal ownership of their names. Perhaps they will celebrate our decision.
Or maybe they will decide that their old mum and dad were hopelessly misguided and idealistic in lumping them with such a mouthful of a name in the first place.
Comedian and radio presenter PJ Gallagher and his partner decided to assign only her name to their twins, when they arrived in 2023.
“It was one of those conversations we had,” says Gallagher. Like many parents nowadays, it was a subject that required careful planning.
“Over a number of weeks, it kept raising its head.” “I was pretty adamant that I didn’t want them to have my name,” he explains.
“I wanted them to have the mother’s name because I never really imagined myself having kids and [with] my own adoptive history, it just always felt a bit odd to pass that down, and I’d rather just move into whatever the next family was going to be.”
Has the absence of his own surname in his children caused any administrative headaches?
“It hasn’t yet,” says Gallagher. “I think it may, but they’re too young now for it to matter. But I don’t mind. It’s still the way I’d prefer to have it.”
Bestselling novelist Vanessa Fox O’Loughlin, who writes under the pseudonym Sam Blake, decided to double-barrel her name when she got married.
“Fox is my maiden name and O’Loughlin is my married name,” she explains. “I wanted to hang on to my identity, I think.” She has now passed this surname on to her two children.
But assigning a double-barrelled name doesn’t always translate in reality. Do her children actually use it?
“One does and one doesn’t,” she says. “It’s very long, so even I don’t always use the whole lot, because it’s a bit confusing for people.”
Interestingly, she finds that rather than people dropping the last part of her surname, many will drop the middle part. But why does this happen?
“Nobody drops the O’Loughlin (but) lots of people drop the Fox,” she says.
“Maybe because it’s Ireland and that’s the part they recognise. It’s not hyphenated, my name, so I think maybe people think Fox is a second name. It’s very confusing, especially when I book into a hotel.”
This is because she variously books in under one of three names: Fox O’Loughlin, O’Loughlin or Sam Blake.
“They look at you like you’ve got two heads.”
