McCarthy is one of Ireland's grandest surnames, the anglicised form of Mac Cárthaigh — "son of Cárthach," a personal name generally read as loving or kind-hearted. The family descends from the Eóganacht dynasty that once held the kingship of Munster, and from the eleventh-century king Cárthach Mac Sáirbhreathach came the line that ruled the Kingdom of Desmond, southwest Munster, for five centuries.
Three great branches divided that territory: McCarthy Mór around Killarney and the Kerry borderlands, McCarthy Reagh in the barony of Carbery in west Cork, and McCarthy Muskerry along the Lee valley west of Cork city. It was the Muskerry branch that built Blarney Castle in the fifteenth century — home to the famous Blarney Stone and the legend of the "gift of the gab," said to have originated with a McCarthy lord's endlessly eloquent delays of Queen Elizabeth I. A century earlier, King Cormac Mac Cárthaigh had commissioned Cormac's Chapel at the Rock of Cashel, still regarded as the high point of Hiberno-Romanesque architecture in Ireland.
The Desmond Rebellions and the Munster Plantation of the 1580s began a long decline in McCarthy landholding that the Cromwellian and Williamite settlements completed by the early eighteenth century. Many McCarthys emigrated as the Great Famine devastated Cork's coastal parishes in the 1840s, carrying the name to America, Britain, and Australia, where it produced figures as varied as the politician and novelist Justin McCarthy and the writer Mary McCarthy.
Cork and Kerry remain the name's ancestral heartland today, and every product in this collection nods to that Desmond legacy. Read the full story of the dynasty, its castles, and its descendants in our McCarthy surname history.
