McCarthy

The McCarthys were the dominant Gaelic dynasty of southern Munster from the 11th century to the Tudor conquest, ruling the kingdom of Desmond from a chain of fortresses through Cork and Kerry — Carrigaphooka, Kilcrea, Macroom, Blarney, Pallice. The senior MacCárthaigh Mór line claimed the kingship of Desmond and was acknowledged as such by the Tudor administration, which recreated him as the first Earl of Clancare in 1565.

The most famous of the McCarthy holdings is Blarney Castle outside Cork city — built around 1446 by Cormac Láidir Mac Cárthaigh, lord of Muskerry. The legend of the Blarney Stone — that a kiss bestows the gift of eloquent speech — attaches to a particular block of bluestone built into the castle's machicolation, kissed by a million tourists annually. The legend in its modern form is a 19th-century invention; the underlying word 'blarney' for plausible flattery, however, is genuinely 16th-century, and is genuinely owed to a McCarthy: Cormac Teige McCarthy of Muskerry, who fobbed off Elizabeth I's representatives with a sequence of plausible-sounding but never-delivered submissions until the queen herself reportedly said 'this is all Blarney — what he says he never means'.

Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023), the American novelist of Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men, descended from a Rhode Island-McCarthy line of mid-19th-century emigration. The political McCarthys — Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, the Australian historian Mary McCarthy — all from the broad Cork-Kerry Mac Cárthaigh diaspora.