Many writers from the suburbs of history, such as Ireland and Argentina, produced more original work than their counterparts in the United States; they still seem to.
I want to say to all of you that when I take my oath of office I will do my absolute best to use all of my abilities for all of the people of Ireland.
There was a lot of politics going on, and Ireland were denied an Olympic gold medal in 2008.
The landscape in Ireland is just – I’ve never been in such a beautiful place with the lakes and ocean and everything.
My feet always danced to Irish traditional music, but I was very glad to get out of the North of Ireland in the mid-Seventies when it was really closed and tight and relentlessly unforgiving.
Northern Ireland still suffers from its past, and it will take generations to escape sectarianism and for violence to end totally. Nonetheless, it is in a different place now than during the Troubles, and it will not go back to the old days.
I don’t think America has ever had a center the way London is the center of England or Dublin is the center of Ireland.
I love playing in Ireland and I’ve had great support here, like I get everywhere.
I think the best comedy is tragicomic. Yeah, I suppose if you were to look at everything I’ve done, there is a bit of a black streak through all of it. It’s not deliberate: it’s what makes me laugh, and there’s a fine tradition of it, especially in Ireland.
There’s been many highs throughout my international career which I’ll always remember with fondness, including my debut against Northern Ireland, winning two international player of the year awards, and my hat-trick in Malta.
There can be no perfect Europe in which Ireland is denied even the least of its national rights.
My dad was a militant atheist, or is a militant atheist. My mum was sort of bought up in a religious family because she was a Protestant from Ireland but wasn’t especially religious.
Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland – it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
While the E.U. Withdrawal Act ensures that Brexit will work for all the devolved nations and our U.K. devolution settlements, the special requirements of Northern Ireland, which uniquely shares a land border with another E.U. member state, present a more formidable challenge.
I am very sure of the ground I stand on. I am also very sure that it is the path shared by republicans across this island genuinely interested in building a new agreed Ireland: republicans who put Ireland before ego, criminality, and self-gain.
People think we are such great talkers, but there is so much silence in Ireland about certain issues.
My father was the orphaned son of immigrants to the United States from Ireland. My father never knew his parents. His mother died – we’re not sure – either at or shortly after his birth, and he and all of his siblings were placed in orphanages in the Boston area.
It’s strange coming back to Northern Ireland, but it feels like a home away from home.
In the 19th century, we didn’t much like the loud annexationist voices south of the border or American support for Sinn Fein adventurers who thought, by seizing the Canadian colonies, they could force Britain out of Ireland.
Tony Blair has made a good contribution to the cause of peace in Ireland. He has made a great effort to understand it. He has great empathy with the need to resolve the conflict.
If you sit down with British officers or British senior NCOs, they understand the sweep of history. They know the history of British forces not just in Afghanistan but the history of British successful counter-insurgencies – Northern Ireland, Malaysia.
It wasn’t so long ago that it was not popular to speak Gaelic in Ireland because the areas that Gaelic is spoken in were much poorer areas.
I’ve been lucky enough to travel widely. When you’re based in Europe, it’s very easy to go to Madrid or Budapest for the weekend. I also lived in Italy for ten years and now live in Ireland.
The Church controlled so much in Ireland for so long. I’m not going to get into whether or not religion per se is a bad thing, but my point is the political aspect in Ireland was way out of kilter, and it wasn’t right.
Home, for me, is with the people who I really love – whether that’s in England with my family, Ireland with my relatives, or Germany and Canada with my friends.
Iceland, though it lies so far to the north that it is partly within the Arctic Circle, is, like Norway, Scotland, and Ireland, affected by the Gulf Stream, so that considerable portions of it are quite habitable.
If I didn’t want to be playing for Ireland, I wouldn’t be here.
Ireland is such a young society. The British were the ruling class up until they left about a hundred years ago, and we’ve been trying to work out what our class hierarchy is ever since.
You’re basing your laws and your whole outlook on natural life on mythology. It won’t work. That’s why you have all these problems in the world. Name them: India, Pakistan, Ireland. Name them-all these problems. They’re all religious problems.
The country I live in is never clear about its name. My passport says ‘the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,’ and citizens of the U.K. may call themselves British, English, Scottish, Welsh or from Northern Ireland.
My grandparents were all born in the U.S., but their parents came from Ireland.
On the other hand, at some level the mass of unresolved issues in Northern Ireland does influence the fact that there are so many good writers in the place.
Clericalism has rendered some of Ireland’s brightest, most privileged and powerful men either unwilling or unable to address the horrors cited in the Ryan and Murphy Reports.
I began to write in an enclosed, self-confident literary culture. The poet’s life stood in a burnished light in the Ireland of that time. Poets were still poor, had little sponsored work, and could not depend on a sympathetic reaction to their poetry. But the idea of the poet was honored.
By adopting the ‘free trade,’ or British, system, we place ourselves side by side with the men who have ruined Ireland and India, and are now poisoning and enslaving the Chinese people.
Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth century society up to about 1970 and then it almost bypassed the twentieth century.
It’s Northern Ireland, it’s Ireland, it’s Scotland, it’s Wales, there’s Scousers, Londoners, all behind me.
I had a very peripatetic childhood, so I bounced around. Lived in Ethiopia until I was, like, three or four and then lived between Ireland and London.
We’ve seen a lot of dirty politics in Ireland.
Ireland has a role to play in making the E.U. united and strong.
Born in Russia, forged in Ireland, they don’t make them like this anymore.
Churchill the right-winger has been elevated to a status where you can’t criticise him. People from the time remember him as an imperialist, a hard-right politician, very instrumental in the oppression of Ireland and the attempt to defeat the general strike.
I do think culture is an argument, and that was part of the way I was brought up. People at a social occasion in Ireland will start shouting and arguing. When the Yeats family lived in Bedford Park, they had to go round to the neighbours to say, ‘You might think we are fighting, but this is the way we talk to each other.’
I’ve never put Northern Ireland into a novel because it’s not my territory. I come from the South, so my imaginative territory is very much the Republic of Ireland rather than the North. Even though, if I wrote a novel about the North, it might sell more.
Home in Ireland, I went to Collins Barracks and spent some time wandering around, making notes on the various guns, knives and swords.
We have achieved tremendous success in Ireland and internationally on the strength of our creativity and design skills.
I was big into hip-hop as a kid, and when I was eighteen, I got into dance and rave music, which was popular in Ireland at the time.
I have my older daughter Ireland and my wife Hilaria, and I have Carmen and Rafael.
Northern Ireland as a whole is a great snooker country because of Alex Higgins and Dennis Taylor and now of course there is Mark Allen. It’s a hotbed of snooker and a place where our sport is always well supported.
Going through secondary school in Ireland, everyone’s like, ‘What are you gonna do when you finish school? Go to college? Study business? Study electronics?’ I was like, ‘Well I kinda love wrestling, so I don’t see why I should want to study anything else except wrestling.’ For me, it was a no brainer.
My ultimate dream would be for Derry City to become champions of an all-Ireland league in a united Ireland.
We shall not fight for the preservation of the enemy, which has laid waste with death and desolation the fields and hills of Ireland for 700 years.
If I knew I could never come back to Ireland, to England, I think I’d fall off the tree.
I haven’t been hung up on the international scene, I’m not sitting there waiting on the Ireland squad to be announced to see if I am in it.
Every publisher or agent I’ve ever met told me the same thing – that Irish readers don’t want to read about the bad old days of the Troubles; neither do the English and Americans – they only want to read about the Ireland of The Quiet Man, when red-haired widows are riding bicycles and everyone else is on a horse.
