I’m home a lot. Because I live in Ireland, we can live under the celebrity radar. I might go missing for a whole year.
I was born in 1935. But my mother and father – who were immigrants from Ireland – and everybody that I knew growing up in Brooklyn came out of the Depression, and they were remarkable people.
With the Celtic Warrior thing, I wanted to convey a positive sense of Ireland.
I’m gonna be a better McGregor. I’m gonna be the American superstar. He’s the Ireland superstar.
It’s so tough to get movies made in Ireland anymore. A whole generation of Irish filmmakers doesn’t have the resources to get a movie made.
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
I made my final collection in college in London using Irish handwoven wool. That is how I discovered Ireland first; I just fell in love with it, really.
Look around at the countries of Europe, and you’ll find that practically all of them have pasts that are just as tragic as Ireland’s, yet the people seem able to find some creative way at moving into the future.
The idea of ignoring your past, only to confront it later in life, is a familiar experience whether you come here from Hungary or French Canada or Ireland.
Journalism took me around the world. I worked in London for ten years and reported on the collapse of the Soviet Union, the troubles in Northern Ireland, and the first Gulf War.
I loved my time growing up in Northern Ireland doing youth drama, that is where it all began for me.
I’m really lucky to have a lot of friends in fashion. I don’t know if that’s common, but I just get along with a lot of people. My really close friends are Ireland Baldwin, Kendall Jenner, Lily Aldridge and Devon Windsor.
Ireland is home. And I’d love to move home. That’s always been the plan.
For over 30 years, the IRA showed that the British government could not rule Ireland on its own terms.
Indeed, American companies make three times as much profits from their investment in one E.U. country, Ireland, than they do from all their investments in China.
No, I just thought of a story and wrote down what I saw. It was about two kids in Ireland who went around killing people. It was called Travelers, and it was made as an independent film.
I spend most of my time in London but I come back to Ireland whenever I can.
Ireland was a place for the renewal of hope and I still see it like that.
Before the Civil War, the Negro was certainly as efficient a workman as the raw immigrant from Ireland or Germany. But, whereas the Irishmen found economic opportunity wide and daily growing wider, the Negro found public opinion determined to ‘keep him in his place.’
Where issues used to be, say, parochial or local in Ireland or England and so forth, all politics is global now because all business is global.
I looked at it, and it was like, ‘Can I push and make the Olympic squad?’ It is tough going from 18 players, including Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. I thought that might be a push too far for me. I had no Champions League with Chelsea. I lost my motivation.
Home will always be Northern Ireland but my schedule means for the next few years I won’t be there as much. I can’t do the same things that I did a year ago. That is I’m something conscious of, but I’m not sad about it. It’s fine.
We have to face up to the fact that without the armed uprising in 1916 Britain would not have withdrawn from southern Ireland.
I try and speak out on things that affect where I live in London, and at home in Enniskillen. For instance, I am very keen we get our bypass – the town is completely clogged with traffic and it’s one of the most beautiful inland towns in Ireland.
Ireland has made its choice for the future and it has chosen the version of Irishness it will build. I know, and I will work with head and heart to be part of it with all of you in creating that future one in which all of us can be part of and part of us too.
I do think the ICC has financially helped Afghanistan and Ireland a lot, but I think it’s crucial that the ICC provides these Associate nations with quality coaches to work on their basics.
I’m going to be looking forward, asked to be judged on my record, not taken back as has been the – in a sense, the tendency throughout politics in Northern Ireland, is to always look back, always look at what was said a long time ago, instead of looking forward.
I have a theory about Ireland, being at the edge of Europe. For 1,000 years, people didn’t know what was beyond. But we thought about it – a lot. And that ‘beyond’ became internalized in our psyche.
A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
I was raised in a very old fashioned Ireland where women were reared to be lovely.
I’m sure there’s some sort of cynicism or fatalism in Ireland and England. We are fatalistic here, and sometimes we need to be shaken out of that.
We would not give up our own country – Ireland – if we were to get the whole world as an estate, and the Country of the Young along with it.
It was very clear, if you grew up in the middle of Ireland, just how potent a force the Internet was and could be. I was always seduced by the potency of computers and the possibilities for which they could be leveraged.
Unfortunately, in the north and the south of Ireland, intolerant habits are part of the fabric of emotion, part of the identity crisis which afflicts the population of the country.
What I discovered all over Ireland is that people living simple lives by the sea or in the remote countryside seem a lot calmer than city folk with their iPads and their Android phones.
The thing that started the peace movement in Ireland was anger – my anger. It wasn’t anger; it was fury.
I know so many Irish musicians. They’re all over, because there has been so much emigration from Ireland. Like the Jews.
Comparing Oceanic art generally with Negro art, it has a livelier, thin flicker, but much of it is more two-dimensional and concerned with pattern making. Yet the carvings of New Ireland have, besides their vicious kind of vitality, a unique spatial sense, a bird-in-a-cage form.
I have ambitions to set records which will be hard to chase down, like getting more than 100 caps for Ireland.
When I was 20 years old, I was living in Ireland, going to school in Cork. There was this girl in my film class that I was kind of flirting with. We had this notebook that we passed back and forth. We would write 10 questions and then pass it back while we were supposedly paying attention.
The fact is, I’ve always felt more British than Irish. Maybe it was the way I was brought up, I don’t know, but I have always felt more of a connection with the U.K. than with Ireland.
There’s a lot of ‘ancestor tourism’: and people will go back to Ireland to touch ground and have a pint in the same place where their forefathers once did whatever their forefathers did, and there’s a real strong idea that we connect to the place once we get there.
We played a festival in Ireland once, and in the middle of ‘New Slang,’ the Scissor Sisters kicked in across the field on this mega stage. It was a little distracting. It was hard to keep track of what I was supposed to sing.
I’m a massive Greggs fan! I never actually knew about Greggs when I lived over in Ireland but the minute I came over everyone was talking about Greggs sausage rolls so I had to try them and I’m just obsessed.
This is the great thing about Northern Ireland. I walk down the street and people stop me and say things like, ‘I know you. You’re that wee golfer, aren’t you?’ I say, ‘Yeah, that’s me.’ They say, ‘Keep it up, wee man.’ It’s very funny and that’s why I want to stay here as long as possible.
It’s an honor to live in and serve the great City of Los Angeles. I’m also immensely grateful for the support I’ve received from Ireland.
But one of the most fantastic things about Ireland and Dublin is that the pubs are like Paris and the cafe culture. And Dublin, in many ways, is a pub culture.
I was born in Northern Ireland in 1951. I lived most of my life there until 1986 or 1987.
Well I think it has always been a mistake to reduce the peace process in Ireland to a decommissioning process.
I think there’s a down-to-earthness with Midwesterners and with people from the Midlands – which is where my family is from – in Ireland.
I never wanted for anything. We went to Ireland for holidays every year. I was 14 when we first went to Italy. My mum was determined I was going to go to a good school. My mum was an absolute grafter. A real grafter. I got my work ethic from her.
I’m always happy to be in Ireland in general, it’s one of my favorite places.
There’s a lot I’ve missed about living in Ireland. You miss family, particularly when you’ve got kids.
People travel overseas to do things overseas that aren’t legal in Ireland all the time. You know, are we going to stop people going to Las Vegas? Are we going to stop people going to Amsterdam? There are things that are illegal in Ireland, and we don’t prevent people from travelling overseas to avail of them.
When I was growing up, Belfast City Hall was surrounded by security, and we had no access to it. But now, people come in and out of it all the time. On a nice day, office workers and students sit on the lawn outside and have lunch. It’s great to see how Northern Ireland has changed. To be part of that is fantastic.
