An Open Letter To The Irish People
We need to talk about the thing we never talk about.Not the weather. Not the match. The other thing — the one under all of it. The one we have been walking around for two hundred years the way you'd walk around a hole in the ground at night: carefully, without looking down, teaching the children to walk around it too.This is a short letter to the Irish people about the wound we all carry — the hunger never mourned, the language lost, the telling that moved inside, the laundries everyone knew about, the boats, the bottle — and the great national instruction that has kept all of it sealed: whatever you say, say nothing.And it is about the older thing underneath: a time when this island knew how to grieve. When the keen rose wild over the graves and no one was ashamed. That knowledge was shamed out of us — but it was never lost. The fire is still under the grass.The letter ends with one ask. Not for money, not for outrage — for a quieter courage: say something. To your father before it's too late. To your daughter before she learns the silence. Break the instruction. Let the keen back in.Written to be read standing up, and to be read aloud — at a kitchen table, at a fire, at a wake, to the one abroad. It is free, and it is free to copy: this letter may be reproduced in full, with its title, anywhere it might do good. No permission is needed. That is what it is for.If it says something you have always known and never heard said, the whole book is here too: The Fire Under the Grass.
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