My parents were both first-generation Irish Catholics raised in Brooklyn.
Irish history having been forbidden in schools, has been, to a great extent, learned from Raftery’s poems by the people of Mayo, where he was born, and of Galway, where he spent his later years.
I speak with a Northern Irish accent with a tinge of New York. My wife has a bit of a Boston accent; my oldest daughter talks with a Denver accent, and my youngest has a true blue Aussie accent. It’s complicated.
My wife and I both come from Irish families. There are two kinds of Irish families: the hitting kind and the kidding kind. If you’re fortunate – and both of us are – you come from the kidding kind of Irish family.
I had moments with my father that were exquisite – the stories he told me about Cuchulain, the mythological Irish warrior, are still magical to me.
My dad’s from Zimbabwe, and my mom is Danish, Irish, and Norwegian, so I have influences from a lot of different places.
My mom always had a softer spot for boys, as a lot of Irish women do. If you were a girl, you’d have to sing or wear a pretty dress. But boys could just sit there and be brilliant for sitting there and being boys. It makes you that little bit more forward. Pushy. I was singing, always.
Gaelic football is a very Irish sport, which I played.
My family calls me Declan. But most people call me E.C. I think it comes from my dad. It’s an Irish convention. You usually call the first child by the initials.
Irish novelist John Banville has a creepy, introverted imagination.
I’m Irish. I don’t know how to take a compliment.
I’m from durable stock. I’m made to work. I’m Irish.
Second-generation Hispanics marry non-Hispanics at a higher rate than second-generation Irish or Italians. Second-generation Hispanics’ English language capability rates are higher than previous immigrant groups’.
I got makeup tests and hair tests for ‘Versailles,’ and the main thing they were obsessed with was that my hands were disgusting. I had three years of Irish dirt under my nails. I had to have manicures and everything.
Our common membership of the E.U. provided an important external context to the Irish and U.K. governments working together for peace. It should not be discounted lightly.
My dad had these great Benny Goodman albums that I was obsessed with, and Louis Prima’s another guy I loved, and Peter Niro the jazz pianist. I loved international music: Irish music, Mexican music. I love the different colours that they all have.
Irish national teams are usually very physical.
Many black people I know are proud of the Irish part of their heritage – an Irish grandparent, say – but they recognise that many people believe in a form of racial purity. And it is from that belief that prejudice starts.
I have drawn inspiration from the Marine Corps, the Jewish struggle in Palestine and Israel, and the Irish.
If this humor be the safety of our race, then it is due largely to the infusion into the American people of the Irish brain.
If you are a Northern Irish actor, maybe subconsciously more than consciously, you do have an instinctive responsibility at some point to tackle the recent history of where we have come from. It’s not only a responsibility, but a privilege.
Being Irish, I grew up eating a Sunday roast.
I’ve been canyoning, snorkelled a shipwreck, and learnt to Irish dance, all in the same week.
You can get this feeling of the English or Scottish or Irish or Welsh fairy, but it is by nature very elusive. It would be possible to pin down a German fairy, but the English one just vanishes, becomes the shadow under the trees.
‘You’re Ugly Too’ isn’t a comedy, but it has a lightness of touch with a hard edge. But it’s essentially a warm story tinged with a bit of melancholy in the great Irish tradition. I’m very proud of that film.
I think Paul McGuinness and U2 created the Irish music industry. It certainly wasn’t there before that.
It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking-glass of a servant.
I’ve got many different voices – I have a Southern girl, an Irish girl. I have a gibberish language that you’d have to decipher. I guess I try to never take myself too seriously.
In this context the British and Irish governments will have to promote a new, imaginative and dynamic alternative in which both governments will share power in the north.
The Irish crowd and the humour, they really get it. Them riffing with ‘The Room’ makes the film watchable for me.
I must admit, even though I’m the product of two Jewish parents, I think the Irish temper got in there somewhere, so I’m going to check Mom’s genealogy.
Irish Americans are no more Irish than Black Americans are Africans.
The Spanish and the American audiences are lunatics. They are very passionate and, like the Irish, they don’t have as many inhibitions. If you are playing somewhere like Austria or Sweden, it takes them a little while to come out of themselves.
In 2016, let us all join the Rising, and the only final message is this very clear: Up the Rebels. Up a sovereign and independent Irish republic.
I had an Irish Catholic education. Horrible nuns, vindictive and cruel.
I hope ‘The Voice’ has a fifteen-year run, don’t get me wrong. But I come from nothing, and maybe it’s the Irish in me, but my attitude is always like, ‘They’ll figure me out soon.’
I’ve got the fighting Irish, and Puerto Ricans are some of the best fighters in the world. I’m proud of who I am, but it doesn’t define me as a person.
I’ve had Irish skin from the time I was a young girl.
You think that religion is a thing that is there to help you and to see you through life, and then you wake up one morning and find the entire Irish situation, the civil war that’s based on religion.
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.
With such riches as I have in life, you’re always nervous. Being Irish, you’re waiting for something to knock it sideways.
I’ve heard some duff Irish accents. The worst must be Mickey Rourke.
They are gorgeous. They have beautiful blue eyes and lovely dark hair – that’s the typical Irish.
For me, being Catholic was who I was and who I am, just like I’m Irish and Slovak. It’s just so ingrained in us.
When I was 14, I almost had a big green leprechaun tattooed on my forearm. Thank God I didn’t – it would have been a nightmare to cover up as an actor. I went with a group of mates and, being Irish, thought a leprechaun would be perfect.
I’m just an old Irish guy who believes if you have children, you need to be there to raise them.
I’ve been really inspired by my roots – my ancestors and Irish history.
I was raised Irish Catholic, but I don’t consider myself Irish Catholic: I consider myself me, an American.
Sometimes the archaism of the language when it’s spoken is why we are all in love with the Irish today.
I believe in all of these Irish myths, like leprechauns. Not the pot of gold, not the Lucky Charms leprechauns. But maybe was there something in the traditional sense? I believe that this stuff came from somewhere other than people’s imaginations.
The last thing we want to see, given the success of the peace process, is the return of installations along the Irish border.
I see the world through Irish eyes, and they are smiling.
I’m from an Irish family and, even though I grew up in 80s London, I spent a lot of my childhood in southwest Ireland.
My father told me fairy stories and he read to us. And my grandmother was Irish. She told us about ‘the little people.’ When I went into the forest I used to look for them.
‘Lollipop Opera’ is the backdrop to Finsbury Park. A place that is very thriving, interracial and lot of music stores, Greek, Turkish, all sorts of immigrant music. It’s utter Englishness. It blends the Jamaicans, the Irish. It’s like what Jim Reeves did with American country music.
I had a very happy childhood, which is unsuitable if you’re going to be an Irish writer.
I’ve always been conscious of the fact that there aren’t enough Irish voices on British television compared to the amount of Irish people who live there.
I was born in Vietnam, and I was adopted by an Irish lady and a Hungarian man, and then I moved to America.
Even when they have nothing, the Irish emit a kind of happiness, a joy.
We do ballet dancing, Irish dancing, Scottish, jazz, tap – whatever country we’re in or whatever culture that we’d like to present to the children.
I was born into an Irish Catholic family in the New York area in this great, wonderful, and safe country, but the Holocaust has always haunted me, and it has long stood as a stumbling block to faith. How could such a thing be? How is that consistent with the concept of a loving God?
I’m Irish. I think about death all the time.
To be honest I live among the English and have always found them to be very honest in their business dealings. They are noble, hard-working and anxious to do the right thing. But joy eludes them, they lack the joy that the Irish have.
My mother was from upstate New York; she’s of Irish and German descent. My father was from Ghana.
