Top 474 Ireland Quotes

From my experience of shooting ‘Tudors’ on the island of Ireland, you cannot predict the weather.

I’ve always felt a bit hard done by in England – you know, I’ve won the Bisto three times in Ireland, but it has felt like nobody has even heard of me in my home country.

Ireland’s place north and south is in Europe and leading change in Europe.

We’ll be launching the new public prosecution service in Northern Ireland tomorrow. I’ll be doing it in Belfast tomorrow. This is an entirely new era, in which criminal justice now exercised on an equal basis, not the old basis in which community division was a feature.

When I visited Ireland with my father and heard the people on the farm talking, I couldn’t believe the gift of language they had. I felt very untalented.

I think people saw him as someone who did good things for Ireland. If you looked at all the Irish actors in ‘Excalibur’ alone – Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson – there was a whole gaggle of Irish actors who’ve gone on to become stars, so Dad was really part of that.

We can be a very natural partner as a support base for Ireland to use Mexico to enter into the North American and South American markets and for Mexico, in turn, to really take advantage of Ireland as a gateway to the European markets.

I feel warm toward my Irish side, but I don’t know the country or the people. Hearing a traditional Irish fiddle, I feel very connected to Ireland, but that’s a nostalgia many people feel who aren’t Irish at all.

Stand-up came naturally to me because people in Ireland talk. But that’s not talking on panel shows; it is structured fun. It reminds me of some tragic aunt clapping her hands and bouncing into a room and announcing we should all play games… and if we don’t we are all a rotten spoilsport.

It’s a complicated relationship with the place one grows up in, particularly if it’s Northern Ireland.

I took my Canadian perspective over to Ireland and dug around, and I found a very interesting story and brought it back.

A huge part of Apple profits generated in Europe, in African countries, Middle East, and India were all booked in Ireland. And I think it is a very basic principle in taxation that your profits are taxed where the profits are generated.

I absolutely love Ireland. It’s one of the most beautiful places on Earth, and I have strong ties here. Both my grandmothers are from Ireland, and I have spent every summer in Bantry since my father, who is an artist, had the romantic idea 20 years ago to buy an old farmhouse on the west coast and renovate it.

I do hope in Ireland children in schools can experience the richness of chess and it’s positive effects.

If the Kennedys had been barred from entering America after fleeing Ireland during the famine, my grandfather never would have been president.

Ireland is a great place to be odd.

I hate wearin’ sunglasses, to be honest with you. You don’t need sunglasses in Ireland.

Must we be put to shame by much smaller and poorer countries, by Ireland, France, Austria or Sweden, who have understood that a nation’s support of its arts is a matter of both national pride and cultural survival?

No-one wants to see a return to the hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland.

My father was totally Irish, and so I went to Ireland once. I found it to be very much like New York, for it was a beautiful country, and both the women and men were good-looking.

Ireland was, of old, called the Isle of Saints because of the great number of holy ones of both sexes who flourished there in former ages or who, coming thence, propagated the faith amongst other nations.

The reality of life in Northern Ireland is that if you were Protestant, you learned British history, and if you were Catholic, you learned Irish history in school.

In my teens, I joined the Parachute Regiment. I jumped out of lots of airplanes, as much as the Government budget would allow us to. I did two active tours of duty: Northern Ireland, and then the Falklands war.

The problem with Ireland is that it’s a country full of genius, but with absolutely no talent.

I came to Ireland 20 years ago as a student, hitch-hiking round for a week and staying in Dublin.

There was a kind of madness in the country. Eamon De Valera, the prime minister, had this vision of an Ireland where we’d all be in some kind of native costume – which doesn’t exist – and we’d be dancing at the crossroads, babbling away in Gaelic, going to Mass, everyone virginal and pure.

Once the war started, my grandfather went to England, where he was under house arrest on the Isle of Man, and then to Ireland, but not to Germany. In no way did he, or my grandmother for that matter, ever support either the war or the Holocaust.

My great, great grandfather, Michael O’Hanson, fled the impending potato famine of Ireland and arrived in America in the early 1840s with his bride, Bridget. They headed for Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love and a mecca for Irish-Catholic immigrants then.

I don’t hate redheads! The millionaire men – wealthy men – never pick them. Every time I offer them they say no. I could say the most gorgeous redhead in the world and they’ll say no, they don’t want it. Now if you ask an Irish guy in Ireland, he says ‘yes,’ because that’s indigenous to that country.

I was attracted to black music for the same reason that I loved those old Irish ballads. Both were social statements of sorts, and both were indigenous to their respective cultures: Ireland, where my father had grown up, and towns like St. Louis along the Mississippi River, where I was growing up.

As you can hear, I am English – I am from England – and it was really good playing for Ireland.

People were buying two, three and four houses to be sold on and rented out. Then the money ran out. To this day you see a lot of what we call ghost estates around Ireland, which have not been finished.

Ethiopia didn’t just blow my mind; it opened my mind. Anyway, on our last day at this orphanage a man handed me his baby and said, ‘Would you take my son with you?’ He knew, in Ireland, that his son would live, and that in Ethiopia, his son would die.

Ireland is a good place to start out as a filmmaker. If what you do is good, even at a very small scale, it will get recognized.

I’m Irish; I grew up in Ireland, and it’s impossible to separate my background from who I am as a filmmaker.

Our visits to the United States have brought huge benefits by helping attract foreign direct investment on a scale not previously seen in the north of Ireland.

It was at Inver Slane, to the north of Leinster, the sons of Gaedhal of the Shining Armour, the Very Gentle, that were called afterwards the Sons of the Gael, made their first attempt to land in Ireland to avenge Ith, one of their race that had come there one time and had met with his death.

When the problems in Northern Ireland started, it was not a question of Protestantism or Catholicism, because the Catholic church was the only church at that time-it was a nationalist conflict.

I’m 100% Celt. In fact, I’m directly related to the progenitor of the high kings of Ireland, Niall of the Nine Hostages.

I was one of the many kids in Northern Ireland who grew up in the countryside and had an idyllic childhood well away from the Troubles.

If Northern Ireland is in one customs regime and the Republic of Ireland is in another, why won’t a customs border be necessary, just as happens with every other land border of this type?

Northern Ireland has treated me well, you know?

I’d be on stage in Ireland performing for thousands of people and just not believing in what I’m doing at all. And it hurt, it hurt badly. I knew every day that I couldn’t continue this way.

I live in Ireland near the sea, only one mile from where I grew up – that’s good, since I’ve known many of my neighbours for between 50-60 years. Gordon and I play chess every day, and we are both equally bad. We play chatty, over-talkative bad bridge with friends every week.

Funnily enough, Northern Ireland is a great example of where politics can win over conflict. The decision to down arms and follow a political path would have been unthinkable once. It shows just what is possible.

I mean Ireland, in all honesty I owe Ireland a lot because I think, and I’m not just saying this flippantly, Ireland is probably the reason that I do the job I do because when I started doing stand-up I came to Ireland and I just sort of gelled with the idea of doing it the way I do – telling stories.

For me, people in Ireland who became actors would have to go through the Billy Barry’s in Dublin.

As a child growing up in Ireland, you would have to go to Dublin if you wanted to go to the luxury brands. And I remember my mother being too uncomfortable to go into some of those stores. I want to get rid of the barrier.

We have seen at first hand that upholding the Good Friday Agreement while also avoiding a hard border in Ireland is the key to unblocking the Brexit logjam.

Unless people who voted for unionist parties are suddenly going to vote for a united Ireland, which I don’t believe will happen, a border poll will be defeated.