The legend has several suggested roots, all involving the MacCarthy dynasty - builders and original owners of Blarney Castle. None of them quite agree with each other, which is fitting for a tradition built around the gift of talking your way out of corners. What matters is what visitors do. They climb the castle stairs, lean back over a high parapet while a staff member holds their legs, and kiss the stone upside-down. The verb is gentler than the geometry. From the kiss alone, supposedly, you walk away able to charm anyone who will listen. The word "blarney" itself has entered English to mean smooth, persuasive, slightly suspect talk, and the village has decided not to argue with that reputation.

Built in 1823 and originally known as Mahony's Mills, the Blarney Woollen Mills was once a water-powered operation producing tweeds and woollens for export. It closed in the early 1970s, and for a moment looked as though it might join the long list of disused Irish industrial buildings slowly returning to weeds. Local entrepreneur Christy Kelleher had a different idea. He bought the mill, kept the stone shell, and reinvented it as a gift store catering to the steady flow of tourists already walking past on their way to the castle. The reinvention worked. The Mills became the second great tourist anchor of the village, and what had been a mill town for textile workers became a mill complex for souvenir shoppers.

The Square at the centre of the village is not paved. It is not lined with cafés. It is a grass field, and every attempt over the years to develop it has been met with what the Wikipedia entry calls, with admirable restraint, "stiff objection from the locals." Markets used to be held there. Now, in summer, townspeople sometimes congregate. That is enough. The Square is a small declaration that Blarney is not entirely a tourism economy and not entirely a village - that the residents have drawn a line somewhere, even if the line is just a patch of grass. The Anglican Church of the Resurrection sits at one edge, watching the negotiation continue, decade after decade.

Blarney had its own railway once, the Cork and Muskerry Light Railway, which opened in 1887 and ran until 29 December 1934. Locals called it the Hook and Eye, and the tram was famously slow - so slow, the story went, that passengers could reach out from the moving carriages and pick blackberries from the hedgerows. Ticket collectors moved between carriages along the outside of the train while it was rolling, a job description that would not survive modern safety regulations. The tram closed in the middle of the Depression, replaced eventually by the Bus Éireann routes that still link Blarney to Mahon Point every half hour. As of 2016 a proposal for a new station on the Dublin-Cork line was still listed as proposed - a status it has held for years.

There is a Blarney behind the tour buses. The local GAA club were All-Ireland Intermediate Hurling Champions in 2009. Blarney United FC plays in the Premier Division of the Munster Senior League. The Blarney Brass and Reed Band, formed in 1981 by locals who wanted a community musical group spanning multiple age groups, has won events at the South of Ireland Band Championships in both 2010 and 2011. There is an Irish-language primary school, Gaelscoil Mhuscraí, established in 2002. The secondary school, Scoil Mhuire Gan Smál, has more than 800 students. Following the 2019 boundary change, Blarney moved from Cork County Council administration into the Cork City Council area - a quiet bureaucratic update that nonetheless redefined who Blarney technically belonged to.