The other day a colleague at work started calling me Seamus. I am Irish, and so is she, and her transformation of my name into the Irish language equivalent was her way of poking fun in my direction. All the same, I'm beginning to think seriously about the suggestion. It could make a good career move.

If I'm thinking of turning a little more exotic, the citizens of Dingle want to go in the opposite direction. Dingle, for those of you who haven't been, is a remote but justly admired fishing port in Ireland. In a referendum held earlier today, its residents voted overwhelming to readopt its English name and save it from the imposition of the Irish placename, An Daingean. In the ballot, 1,005 people voted for Dingle and a mere 70 against. In an era in which democracy has lost much of its lustre, the ballot drew a massive response of 89.6%.

The local council had already begun replacing road signs bearing the word Dingle, but the residents found the name-change confusing and want to go back to living in plain old Dingle. The context for all this is potentially embarrassing to the Irish authorities. It defies the edict of the minister for rural, Gaeltacht and community affairs, for one thing, and comes amid plans for Irish to be tarted up as an official EU language next year.

The dispute over Dingle, I think, is a brilliant case study in the paradoxes and absurdities that govern the politics of identity. Too often, the governing institutions want to fit us into ethnic and racial boxes, the better to "reconnect" with their allotted demographics and find a way of understanding them. Among trans-national corporations, for example, one of the buzzwords is "glocalisation", the imperative, apparently, to "think global and act local." The trend towards glocalisation explains, for example, why McDonald's has adapted its menu to local customs and tastes. Nowadays, this American behemoth churns out the McLox in Norway and a vegetarian Maharaja Mac in India.

In contemporary politics, exactly the same logic of celebrating particularity and ethnicity increasingly takes the place of any across-the-board message or serious political agenda. This logic of particularism and multiculturalism, however, is often backed by po-faced and faceless institutions rather than the "ethnic" or "authentic" identities that they purport to champion. In order to win subsidies and a hearing, the recipients of this cultural largesse are often tempted to dance to their assigned tune.

All hail the citizens of Dingle, then, for overthrowing the yoke of ethnicity in favour of equality, democracy and universalism. At a stroke, they have thrown off their assigned ethnic identity, a political dogma as foreign and divisive as any other. Let's hope that the rest of our cultural and political institutions take the hint. In the meantime, just call me Seamus.