Oisin / Donnacha / Naoise

[Bewildened]

Which do you prefer?

Irish parents, baby will grow up in London.

It really isn't that much of a grind spelling out your name for people or telling them how to pronounce it. It takes seconds to do. I have a name that is uncommon in the country I live in, so I have experience with this. Also, people tend to spend most of their time with the same groups of people, so once those people have been told once, then they know. For random people who I meet in passing, I don't really care how they pronounce or spell my name as I won't be seeing them again. I don't think it is as much of an issue as some posters think.

@sonjadog , that's you. I have a name that can have various spellings and people get it wrong all the time. I find it a PITA.

I'd forget the fada. Pain in the backside on a keyboard. My middle name has one and I hate typing it out.
I'd go for the one that has the easiest pronunciation for spelling. Donnacha for me. I get very very tired of spelling out my Irish name and having it mispronounced.

We work with a family whose son is called Rian. After a while, they told us they wanted us to use a fada.

Sadly, our pathetic IT doesn't make it easy to type any diacritical marks and, if you do, it doesn't recognise the name with an accent being the same as without an accent so that means that some bits of the child's records don't join up with the others.

We are in London. We can cope with pronouncing names from all across the world but our IT systems can't.

Rian doesn’t even need a fada and historically probably didn’t have one (the surname doesn’t), though this child obviously has one and it’s his name so up to him/his family how he wants to spell it (IT systems allowing). But the fada isn’t needed to get the correct pronunciation unlike other names. Not that any of that probably helps you at all @SpanThatWorld.