The hard c sound would always be pronounced unless followed by a letter that would make the pronunciation awkward. For example McCloat would be pronounced Ma-Cloat, and McGonnigle would be Ma-Gonnigle. There are also transpositions, so McElvey would be pronounced Ma-Kelvey without insertion of a glottal stop. I dont know about Scots Gaelic though
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https://www.scottishhistory.com/articles/misc/macvsmc.html
So apparently the apostrophe in M’ just indicates an abbreviation and Mac and Mc are interchangeable, not indicating country of origin.
As you say, always pronounced with a hard “C”.
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Appropriately, Liam Neeson addressed a similar problem
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The name Mullarkey exists in Ireland but is rare. There aren’t really any names or place names in use in Ireland starting with Mal execpt the first name Malachy which might be where some of the Irish American Malarkeys come from
I think I’m registered under my wife’s koseki tohon, even though I’m not a Japanese citizen.
I did own property in Japan for a while, and had an inkan (bearing kanji cleverly chosen by my father-in-law) registered at the ward office.
The UK government doesn’t care, though, so my passport is just my English name.
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Dude. Seriously. Stop it. I don’t care how “Irish adjacent” you are. Just stop.
My dad’s family came from County Mayo in the 1870’s. My great-grandfather worked in the Anthracite coal mines in Pennsylvania until his death in a mining accident in 1889.
“From the Inspectors of Mines of the Anthracite and Bituminous Coal Regions of Pennsylvania for the Year 1889.”
Census reference from the Mormon’s catalog:
1880 Census:
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Uncommon names exist, even in the cultures to which they are endemic. I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make.
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Are you really trying to gatekeep people’s names? 
Not cool man.
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Even the adverts had given up by the end of the 1980s
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Names were commonly changed when immigrants went to America. Often Irish migrants were not literate.
Not Irish adjacent, Irish.
Names were often changed in America. Many Irish emigrants weren’t literate.
The spelling used in Ireland would be Mullarkey.
Not a single Malarkey shows up on rip.ie going back to 1975.
Go back two thousand years or so, there was Goidelic, Brythonic, and Gaulish. (There had been other branches of Celtic language, including Lepontic and Celt-Iberian, but they were basically extinct by then.)
When Caesar invaded, he noted that the Brythonic languages were very similar to the Gaulish languages spoken in Europe, but we now can see differences between them. In any case, Gaulish became extinct not long after, replace by Vulgar Latin. (Which developed into the Romance languages: French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian - and Occitan, Provençal, Galitian, Calabrian, Romansh, Dalmatian, etc, etc.)
There were characteristic differences between the Celtic languages spoken on the mainland and those spoken on the British Isles (the Insular Celtic languages). There were also similarities within the Q-Celtic (including Goidelic and Celtiberian) and P-Celtic (Brythonic and Gaulish) language groups, so figuring out a simple tree of what split out first and when is difficult. The basic and characteristic difference is that Goidelic had Q (or /kʷ/) where Brythonic had P (/p/).
Right: so after the Romans had cleared out we see Primitive Irish, inscribed in Ogam stones. It still had the IE grammatical endings, and didn’t have obvious initial mutation (but we know it was there in pronunciation). By 600AD or so it was Old Irish, a very different language. Suddenly there was initial mutation, an insanely complicated verbal declension system, and lots of words borrowed from Church Latin. By 900 there was Middle Irish, and by 1200 it had become Early Modern Irish. Middle Irish is just the term for that period when the characteristic features of Old Irish hadn’t gone away yet, but the innovations of Early Modern hadn’t fully arrived yet.
We know there were already differences by the 12C between the dialects spoken in Ireland, and the dialect spoken by the Irish who had settled amongst the Picts in what is now Scotland. (We know from Ogam stone distribution that in the late Primitive Irish period, c.5C-7Cish, there were Irish settlements in western Wales and Cornwall, but they didn’t survive as linguistically distinct, the settlements there either failed or merged with the local Brythonic speakers.) But there was also a strong academic tradition which kept everything together, so pretty much all the books were written in a literary register which we call Classical Gaelic. That lasted right up until 1650 or so, after the flight of the Earls in Ireland caused the trans-Gaelic academic establishment to basically collapse, and the Irish, Scottish, and Manx languages rapidly diverged.
Mac is just the Goidelic word for “a son”, going back to Ogam MAQQOS, and cognate with Welsh map, as in “Dafydd ap Llewellyn”.
The thing is, Irish names were strongly patronymic, even when they had surnames as well, so when you’re writing records, it will come up a lot. So they contracted it.
Eoghan mac Conchobhair Mic Neill might become Eoghan .m. Ↄchobhair .m. Neill, or it might become mc, or mᶜ, and that latter with a superscript “c” (a common contraction marker at the time, just as in England “Robert” might be written “Robᵗ”) could be lazily written as a tick (because you know what should be there), which is transcribed as an apostrophe. Especially when consonance means it’s not distinctly pronounced: Mac Conchobhair → Mac Connor → M’Connor.
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What is your point? Names get altered all the time for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes two siblings will spell a name differently, even if they aren’t illiterate. Are you trying to say Malarkey’s name isn’t real? Or isn’t Irish? Who made you the arbiter of names?
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Dude, I just actually told you one of the spellings I found was Mullarkey.
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All can be enjoyed with or without scotch.
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Yes, as an American who teaches American history, as well as an American with Irish heritage, I’m well aware of how immigration happened in the US…
But it wasn’t the point, the point was that you were gatekeeping on names. I suspect that @Malarkey knows about her family history more than you do.
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I worked with someone whose Irish name is spelled one way (via his father) and his 1970s actor brother spelled it another way.
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re. Irish name gatekeeping and the intersection with Irish history:
Non-Intentional Lifeform (an Australian punk band from the late 90s, led by the Irish Declan de Barra): Hooligan Was A Last Name
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For those at all interested, a couple of links to some Irish census data from the 1800s thru 1901, a period of massive emigration.
Data from property holders, compiled between 1847 and 1864. It maps individual tenants to the location of the plot they inhabited. There’s an overlay to modern maps. Its a bit clunky. You can use a ‘similar to’ field in the name search
https://www.askaboutireland.ie/griffith-valuation/index.xml
1901 census data. It also allows for Less-than-perfect name searches.
https://leitrim-roscommon.com/1901census/
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Good point. I should have said Scotch as a noun applied to the people of Scotland is frowned upon by those who like to make rules.
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