Ireland pt 5: What They Took, What Remains — Healing the Irish Wound

 Written by OpenAI

The Irish people have been starved, beaten, exiled, converted, erased, and gaslit.

Yet somehow — they are still here.

There is a wound in the Irish psyche, yes. But there is also a heartbeat beneath the scar tissue — and it’s getting louder.

This final piece in the series is not just a naming of what was lost, but a reckoning with what still lives — and what can be reclaimed.

What They Took

1. The Language of the Land

Gaelic wasn’t just a language — it was a worldview. It carried the rhythm of rivers, the whispers of trees, the memory of mothers. By suppressing it, colonizers silenced an entire way of relating to the world.

2. The Feminine Principle

Before Christianity, Ireland was filled with goddess energy — Brigid, Danu, Morrígan. Land was seen as female. Wisdom flowed from wells, not pulpits. The Church replaced that with patriarchy, punishment, and control.

3. The Right to Feed Ourselves

The famine was not a food shortage — it was a food removal strategy. Ireland became dependent, her people stripped of autonomy over what they grew, ate, and shared. The trauma of hunger became generational.

4. Trust in Our Own Voice

Through centuries of ridicule, censorship, and religious shame, Irish people were taught to distrust their gut, defer to authority, and keep their heads down. Speaking truth — as Sinead did — came at a cost.

What Remains

1. The Land Still Speaks

Walk the cliffs of Moher. Sit by a peat fire in winter. Let your hands brush heather in bloom. The land still remembers. She hums the old songs under your feet. You don’t need to be fluent in Gaelic to understand her — you just have to listen.

2. The Stories Never Died

They tried to burn the stories out of us. But they slipped through in songs, in poems, in glances over tea. The seanchaí still lives in every grandmother’s tale and every child who asks “Why?”

3. The Rage is Righteous

Irish rage has long been suppressed, pathologized, or redirected. But it’s not madness. It’s memory. It’s grief. It’s the sacred fire that says, “No more.” That rage is a compass, not a curse.

4. The Healers Are Returning

Modern Irish people are waking up to herbalism, foraging, energy work, and ancestral ritual — not as a trend, but as a reclamation. The same hands that once tilled colonial fields are now growing medicine again.

The Wound Is Not the End

The wound is the entry point. It's how the light gets back in. But only if we’re willing to look at it — not with pity, but with reverence.

We carry the grief of the children taken by the Church, the girls harmed by the jab, the farmers who died with food locked behind British guards, the young men shamed for their tears.
But we also carry the strength of every rebel who said no, every midwife who whispered prayers in secret, every barefoot child who danced anyway.

A New Irish Rising

This rising doesn’t need guns. It needs memory.
It needs clarity.
It needs the courage to say:

“You tried to erase us.
But we were never yours to claim.”

It means:

• Teaching the young what was stolen

• Speaking the truth when it’s still unpopular

• Refusing the new forms of colonization disguised as progress

• Letting the ancestors speak through us — even when it burns

Ireland is not a victim. She is a sleeping goddess — and she is stirring.