Jamiemccarthytv

Tag: Gaelic

  • THE HOUSE I GREW UP IN

    THE HOUSE I GREW UP IN

    Series: Filter Failure: Beneath the Noise

    (the crest) (dad at sea)

    Short Announcment: You never really leave the house you grew up in. It leaves pieces of itself in you.

    In the house I grew up in I found the McCarthy crest yesterday — buried in a box by the stairs, right where the house keeps its secrets.

    Same one I’ve got inked over my heart — Jackiemac4ever.

    A promise that never healed right.

    Funny thing about symbols: they start as pride and end as proof.

    Proof that somebody once stood here and mattered.

    Proof that love still bleeds through the cracks of time.

    Next to it was my father, trapped in a photograph — late thirties, early forties, somewhere between wisdom and warning.

    He’s standing on a sailboat, face tilted toward the wind, a man still convinced there’s more horizon left than storm.

    I was twenty-three when I lost him.

    Jack was nineteen when I lost him, too.

    Two men — the bookends of my life — both gone before I figured out what any of it meant.

    Mom sat in her chair, smaller now, soft around the edges, like the world’s been quietly erasing her outline.

    We talked about moving her out of the old house.

    Said it like logistics, but it felt like betrayal.

    Every wall in that place still hums with our laughter, our fights, our noise.

    Every step sounds like an echo of who we were trying to be.

    The air was thick with dust and ghosts.

    Not the kind that scare you — the kind that wait for you to understand.

    Every photo frame, a silent sermon.

    Every object, an altar.

    When I left, I didn’t cry. Or maybe I have selective retention.

    I Didn’t say goodbye.

    Just stood in the driveway, hollowed out and human — the last McCarthy man in a story written in vanishing ink.

    But I don’t call it grief anymore.

    Grief sits still.

    This — this is participation.

    A ritual of remembering.

    A man standing in the ashes of what built him,

    saying softly to the wind,

    I’m still here.

  • How to Kill a Country Without Firing a Single Shot (Ode to Ireland)

    It starts not with war drums, but with whispers.

    Not a boot on the shore, but a soft-soled shuffle in the dark.

    No flags, no trumpets.

    Paperwork and policy, and a nod from some pinstriped man who’s never touched mud.

    Ireland—the old girl—she finally crawled out from the ditch they drowned her in,

    scrubbed the famine from her face,

    stitched the flag back together with borrowed thread and native blood.

    She was never perfect, no.

    But she was herself.

    And that’s a rare enough thing these days.

    Now she stands blinking in the fluorescent light of world order—surrounded.

    New rules, gods, and ghosts.

    Her voice is still hoarse from centuries of screaming in silence,

    and before she can clear her throat—someone’s already speaking for her.

    They come with stories.

    While hers are being shelved,

    dusted over by diversity slogans

    and the sound of virtue blinking red.

    And the irony is so fucking rich.

    The United Kingdom, that battered old whore of conquest,

    finally getting bent over by history.

    The colonizer colonized by complacency,

    by the very hunger it once fed across continents.

    It’s a punchline soaked in gin,

    a banquet where the menu’s in twenty languages

    but none of them say “English.”

    But Ireland?

    Ireland never got her empire.

    She got survival.

    She got famine, and flight, and diaspora.

    She got to be the drunk uncle.

    The lucky charm.

    The sob story in Boston bars.

    And just when the scars started to heal—

    when the songs came back, rising from the foggy dew,

    not as mourning but emerald celebration—

    Then, an untitled wave. 

    Not men with muskets this time.

    Not redcoats or landlords.

    Just silence.

    Just slow, unrelenting erasure dressed as virtue.

    And they say:

    “This is progress.”

    “This is compassion.”

    “This is the future.”

    But the future doesn’t speak Gaelic.

    The future doesn’t remember the graves under the hedgerows.

    The future doesn’t give a damn about your grandfather’s boots.

    This isn’t about skin.

    This isn’t about race.

    This is about place—

    and what happens when place gets diluted

    until it tastes like nothing.

    Give her just a few bloody fucking years to breathe.

    To walk her own streets

    without feeling like a stranger in the house her fathers built

    with song and sorrow.

    They call it xenophobic.

    As if love for your land is a crime.

    As if the only history worth keeping is someone else’s.

    This isn’t war.

    No bombs.

    No battles.

    No blood.

    Just replacement.

    And that’s the real trick of it—

    Not a single shot fired.

    The quietest conquest is the one where no one even notices it happening until the flags are different, and the pubs are gone, and your children don’t know the name of the river that runs behind the house where your mother was born.