I’m lucky because I have so many clashing cultural, racial things going on: black, Jewish, Irish, Portuguese, Cherokee. I can float and be part of any community I want.
No one would ever cast me as an aristocrat. I think the big thing about being an Irish artist is access to melancholy. Especially the American Irish. The availability of loss, some kind of pain, is an important part of who we are. I think my Irishness gave me that.
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.
When others stood idly by, you and your families gave your all, in defence of a risen people and in pursuit of Irish freedom and unity.
There’s all sorts of soul. There’s Irish soul and Native American soul. If it touches you and moves you, it’s soul.
Irish people never think we’re Irish. Americans think we’re European or French.
I was educated at a convent in Kent. It was run by Irish and French nuns. I mostly hated it but they did allow me to follow my passion for drama, writing plays, performing, and directing my works.
I see myself as part English and part American, with a dash of Irish thrown in, and a pinch of Italian from my mother’s ancestry.
I have only so many foreign-language neurons. When I learned Spanish, that displaced whatever Irish was left, and then I learned German, and that displaced the Spanish, and when I learned Serbo-Croatian, that displaced the German. So I’m a bit of a muddle.
I’m representative of 21st century Irish design, so I promote Irishness all over the world wherever I go.
I dropped out of school at 17 and joined the Irish band The Frames, getting my first glimpse into the world of professional film making while shooting of a number of rock videos.
My mother was very proud of being Irish and being a Gunnigan in a straightforward way.
I love the fact that Inuit poetry may resonate with me as much as Irish.
I think there’s nothing better than laughing in life, so that’s nice, to be thought of as someone who can make someone laugh. It’s ’cause I think life is hard. You know, my dad was a really silly man. A great Irish silly man. And that’s fine.
The Irish Government can no longer stand by and see innocent people injured and perhaps worse.
For my last meal, I’d want an Irish breakfast with soda bread and one of my dad’s omelettes with three or four eggs.
I think Irish people pride themselves on being at the forefront of technological industries, things like the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, all those hi-tech industries, we’re always there or thereabouts.
Yancy is actually a Native-American name, but I’m Irish. Go figure.
I don’t really go around feeling very Irish at all. I don’t go to Irish pubs. I’ve lived so many places, and I’m still so curious about the bigger world. It’s grand to be alive in a time when mobility is so accessible.
I’ve always been fond of my heritage, particularly my Irish heritage. But I’m also from all over the world.
I come from Chicago and am a child of Irish Catholic parents who were able to wield guilt like a Ginsu knife.
The Irish are just good people, they always have been.
I was brought up in the same house I was born in, and I lived there until I left home as an adult. I also went to a Catholic school, which was full of Irish girls whose parents never split up, so everyone I knew had these big family set-ups.
I think women are in much the same place in the Irish theater as they are everywhere else. Certainly, we have wonderful Irish writers, and we have quite a number of Irish women directors. But there could be more, and there should be more.
We used to speak Irish – Gaelic Irish – around the dinner table, but over the years, we lost that.
Being Irish was a big thing for me, particularly growing up in Chicago.
Irish music in the local pubs was my first exposure to musical expression, and I feel like Irish music is very close to musical theater because it is always telling a story.
Keynes’s contribution was not just to advocate spending government money in the middle of a recession. Every government had done that going back to the days of the Irish potato famine. What he gave to us was a way of thinking about the magnitude and the dimensions and so forth.
There’s still, dare I say it, a cultural propaganda against the Irish, that we are, as women, ‘feisty.’ I hate that word.
There’s no such thing as the ‘Irish Internet.’ It’s just the Internet.
Well, we know that eighteen years after that solemn declaration it was disregarded, and the Irish Parliament, which lasted for five hundred years, was destroyed by the Act of Union. Gentlemen, the Act of Union was carried by force and fraud, by treachery and falsehood.
I am an Irish Catholic person. I’ve been a man and a woman. I speak Russian, sort of. And then I’m very diplomatic.
I am Irish, so I do like a good fight every now and then.
I don’t want to, in any way, characterize a race or a people or get accused of racial profiling, but the Irish, as lyrical and romantic as they can be in their poetry, they can be every bit as repressed in their personal relations.
Our fifty principal cities contain 39.3 per cent of our entire German population, and 45.8 per cent of the Irish. Our ten larger cities only nine per cent of the entire population, but 23 per cent of the foreign.
But more than anything else, for the British folks Irish people were all terrorists. So when we went to Britain, it was always a lot of resistance to U2. And that’s why we came to America.
The British don’t runaway from terrorism. We have had 30-odd years of terrorism in our own country from the Irish Republican Army. We’re used to it.
Tommy Tiernan is an Irish comic who I believe is one of the finest in the world.
I think I’m going to keep my Irish accent forever now in any movie I make, because chicks dig it and that’s all I care about now!
There is no language like the Irish for soothing and quieting.
I am half Scottish. My father is an expat from Glasgow, and on my mother’s side there’s a bit of French, a bit of Scottish, a bit of Irish.
My last name is originally Irish. I’m not exactly sure whereabouts it’s from, but I’ve got family branches that were traced back there.
My mother – the Irish side of the family – was very musical. My mother was a singer; there was music around the house all the time.
Amongst Women concentrated on the family, and the new book concentrates on a small community. The dominant units in Irish society are the family and the locality. The idea was that the whole world would grow out from that small space.
I connect to the tradition of Irish storytelling. And I think there is something – I can’t put my finger on it – something genetic there. Maybe just a need to tell stories.
I’m 100 percent Irish by birth, grew up Italian, and yet I constantly get cast as playing Jewish.
I think the Irish woman was freed from slavery by bingo. They can go out now, dressed up, with their handbags and have a drink and play bingo. And they deserve it.
When I started writing, most of the police department in New York City, especially above the rank of detective, were Irish, Irish-American. I thought it would be more interesting… to use the actual ethnic background in New York City at the time.
Worse than the ordinary, miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
My parents are Irish, my grandparents are Irish, my great-grandparents are Irish. I was born in England; my blood is Irish.
You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
I love flying the flag for Irish designers like Joanne Hynes, Simone Rocha, Natalie B Coleman, Lennon Courtney and Helen Steele.
I remember vividly as a 15-year-old, in 1964, seeing Derry play Glentoran in the Irish Cup Final at Windsor Park in Belfast. Glentoran were one of the two big Belfast teams, along with Linfield. Any rural team playing them was up against the odds.
Howth is a wonderful part of the world. I love the Irish. Howth is extremely charming so anyone would be lucky to have a house there.
I read a lot of nineteenth-century French poetry. And Irish poetry from the ninth century on.
Humor has historically been tied to the mores of the day. The Yellow Kid was predicated on what people thought was funny about the immigrant Irish. When you’re different in a society, you’re funny.
The majority of the members of the Irish parliament are professional politicians, in the sense that otherwise they would not be given jobs minding mice at crossroads.
I do a lot of dialects in my act, including Irish, because I grew up in a neighbourhood that was predominantly Irish and Italian.
If it weren’t for my Irish dancing, I wouldn’t be modeling.
My mother’s family were full-on Irish Catholics – faith in an elaborate old fashioned, highly conservative and madly baroque style. I sort of fell out of the tribe over women’s rights and social justice issues when I was just 13 years old.
A few decades ago, the Irish decided they were tired of being always near the bottom of Europe’s economic indicators. So they envisioned a better future for their country, and they put their people on the right road to get there.
