Ireland and America, music-wise, are very closely related. The Irish came over with their fiddles in hand, and you can hear it in the bluegrass and rockabilly. I love it when music from different countries combine.
The day I turned 16, I moved into my own flat. My parents had just broken up, and I didn’t want to go back to Ireland with my mother. I was doing my A-levels, and my friends would come over and watch ‘Twin Peaks.’
Yes… I miss that everyone in Ireland tries to knock some humour out of every situation. I don’t think I appreciated that. It’s unique to Ireland.
You can listen to carpenters talk for hours in Ireland. The people have a relationship to words that I don’t think you will run into anyplace in the world.
I definitely want to keep working in Ireland, and without being too worthy about it, if it’s possible to bring work into the country, that’s no harm.
There once was a demographic survey done to determine if money was connected to happiness and Ireland was the only place where this did not turn out to be true.
I think a lot of us who grew up in Northern Ireland weren’t politicised enough, frankly.
People in Ireland take in the whole song. After a long history of great singers and songwriters and poets, they are able to consume the entire song – not just the external; they go inside.
People who think I have insulted Ireland or Limerick or my family have not read the book!
There will be no support in the island of Ireland for building a nuclear power station.
I am, of course, directly descended from Brian Boru, the last king of Ireland, a fact certified by my mother and therefore beyond dispute. But as everybody else with a drop of Irish blood in his carcass is also a guaranteed descendant of the old billy goat, I am not overly arrogant because of this royal strain.
Ireland was an idyllic place for us as children. We had all these cousins and all this green countryside. Given what I’ve written about rural Ireland, my memories of it are all blue skies and endless play.
War and peace-making, human rights, humanitarian issues have become industries, but nobody looks closely at human greed, at the arms industry and the manufacture of landmines. Art has to take a wider view. The problems of Ireland are my problems, too.
I think people from Northern Ireland have some kind of unspoken general feeling of what it is to be around segregation. You have an awareness of it because you know how much grief it’s caused.
In Ireland, I have 50-something cousins. My dad is one of six or seven and it’s my second home. I am so proud to be from there.
When I had my first child, I went back to Ireland to live with my mother. So, a typical day there was me being a mother, with my mum showing me how to do things.
There is not a single injustice in Northern Ireland that is worth the loss of a single British soldier or a single Irish citizen either.
Stephen Ireland is one of the most talented players I have seen, and Nigel de Jong is doing really well. He fights for his team all over the pitch, and he has a lot of character.
Money in property is dead money. It doesn’t help the country. It’s funny how the U.K., Ireland and Spain are the most property-obsessed nations in Europe and yet are also the ones suffering the most.
Think Indonesia and tourism, and the first thing that comes to mind is probably Bali. Think golf holiday, and most people would dream of Scotland or Ireland. But Indonesia harbors one of the best-kept secrets in the world of travel: it is a golfer’s paradise.
I’ve worked every job under the sun, from waitressing in my teens, to clocking hours on a construction site in London (I have degrees in quantity surveying and construction). I modelled on the side and starred on reality TV in Ireland.
What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
From the sons of Ith, the first of the Gael to get his death in Ireland, there came in the after time Fathadh Canaan, that got the sway over the whole world from the rising to the setting sun, and that took hostages of the streams and the birds and the languages.
It was great to work in Ireland because it’s such a beautiful country, but it’s not particularly easy to film in because the weather changes all the time.
While I was in London it was completely upside-down. I got a whole new life and it was a challenge to keep in touch with my life in Ireland, but it was great fun. Now though, I’ve been back home since November and gradually all connections with my HP life have been fading.
My job now, as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, is to take this process forward, and that I’m determined to do, whatever old clippings you dig out and whatever old quotes you put before me.
When people are faced with a choice between the Northern Ireland they have got and the perfect Northern Ireland, they complain. But in the real world that isn’t the choice.
Right before ‘Nebraska,’ I went to Ireland to do this little movie called ‘Run & Jump.’ It was so far away from home, I felt a real safety to explore a different kind of role. I loved how it turned out.
I do identify with St. Patrick, not just in name. He drove the snakes out of Ireland. I intend to drive the snakes out of the State House.
We are the Conservative and Unionist party. No Conservative would do anything to harm the union, and that crucially includes Northern Ireland.
One American said that the most interesting thing about Holy Ireland was that its people hate each other in the name of Jesus Christ. And they do!
I live in the middle of nowhere. I’m a country bumpkin in Ireland, in Donegal, and to go from that to Toronto, huge city, massive buildings just stretching so tall.
We’ve got enormous potential, phenomenal potential on our doorstep, which requires politics that makes that work, and that’s what we try to show here in Ireland: that while there’s a lot of pain, the reward at the end of this is career opportunities, prosperity, and brighter days for everybody.
In 2006, when doing a live stage show in Ireland, I tried for the first time to instantly induct a subject on stage, something I had never done before, nor did I know if it would ever work. The result almost cost me my career; the man I grabbed and instantly inducted went out cold and fell to the floor.
I was born in Northern Ireland, also known as Ulster, and I’m Scots-Irish, therefore.
Judged by the law of England, I know this crime entails upon me the penalty of death; but the history of Ireland explains that crime and justifies it.
I couldn’t make a living as a comic in Ireland and I was watching my friends from college getting good jobs, buying houses, and I had to really take stock and say: am I going to go for this comedy thing, or what?
We would only need a bespoke solution for Northern Ireland if Britain leaves the Single Market.
I know now that gang warfare is not the Middle East or Northern Ireland. There is violence in gang violence, but there is no conflict. It is not ‘about something.’ It is the language of the despondent and traumatized.
Ireland and England are like two sisters; I would have them embrace like one brother.
You don’t want to turn up like a Nepal or an Ireland where the entire world thinks that you’re not going to win. You rather turn up like an India or an Australia or an England where everybody says this team is going to win the World Cup.
Since the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland wants to remain a part of Great Britain, and since Ireland itself has shown little interest in reunification, the IRA’s prospects for success through political channels have always been limited.
Father Ted’ was written by Irish people, so that was fine, but around the time we were shooting it ‘EastEnders’ went to Ireland and represented it as this terribly backward society where people were going around with one eye and drunk.
My father’s parents were Irish. Only a year before my father died, he and I went back to Ireland for a week to look at the old homestead.
Both sides of my family had come from Ireland in the 19th century for the same reason: There was nothing to eat over there. Since then, I’ve tried to make up for the potato famine by making the potato the only vegetable that passes these lips.
Rain is also very difficult to film, particularly in Ireland because it’s quite fine, so fine that the Irish don’t even acknowledge that it exists.
You know, the pessimism which exists now in the Middle East existed in Northern Ireland, but we stayed at it.
My father was sick when I was little, and we had a woman, a nanny-type, who was from Ireland. Her daughter was in Irish dancing, so she put me in it, and in the summertime, every weekend was filled with traveling somewhere to dance in competitions.
I sure love Ireland. The first trip I ever made was last year when I did this record in Dublin.
Growing up in Ireland, there are a lot of aspects of God that hang in the air. And my music reflects that.
At this moment, when Ireland seems about to break into something new, we thought it was worth looking back at a time when people seemed to have found a way out of the sectarian division of the country.
You can take a man out of Ireland, but you can’t take the Irishness out of the man.
To be honest, I’m a bit of a snob now; give me a Four Seasons anywhere in the world and I’m happy. Also, they’ve just opened a Ritz-Carlton in County Wicklow, Ireland, which is stunning and has great views.
