The Fire Under the Grass: A book for the Irish people - Paperback

by G. S. Maher (Author)

There is a fire under the grass of this island.

We are a wounded people - wounded by a hunger we never mourned, in a tongue we no longer own, shamed by a telling we now do to ourselves, bled of our young for seven generations, numbed by the bottle we joke about, and sworn, every one of us, from the cradle, to secrecy about all of it. Whatever you say, say nothing. We said nothing. And the wound was handed down, intact, gathering interest, to every kitchen table in Ireland.

This book breaks the instruction.

In five movements it names the wound honestly, without the softening jokes; walks the beautiful house of avoidance we built on top of it - the slagging, the grand, the weather, the story, the busy, the door - and then digs down to what was buried underneath: the keen, the wake, the sweathouses, the fires on the hills, the mountain, the wells. The old Irish technologies of going through sorrow instead of around it - shamed out of us in the very century we needed them most. They are not gone. They are under the grass. And this book is a spade.

Not a history book, though it keeps faith with the history. Not a self-help book, though it ends in your own kitchen, with one true sentence, and the first brave thing. A book for the Irish people - written from inside the wound, not above it - about how a broken people becomes a tempered one.

Whole. Scarred. Lit.

The book closes with an open letter to the Irish people, which may be copied and shared freely.