I’m Irish, working for a Spanish brand, owned by a French company.
Yelling Irish, you can sound like an angry Leprechaun.
I like the idea that something happens to everybody who comes to L.A. – whether they are Mexican, Irish, black, or hillbillies. You come here, and you leave all your traditions behind. And since there’s no traditions here, you just make one up.
My mom was a single mother. She had six siblings in a big Irish family, all descended from shanty Irish folks who arrived after the Famine. They settled along the Cuyahoga River. It’s the river that caught on fire. We’re real good at picking real estate.
Islamic State practise a brand of Islamic law so strict that apparently Raqqa only has two Irish Pubs.
Being Irish is very much a part of who I am. I take it everywhere with me.
How do you spell the name of the Irish prime minister? It sounds like ‘teeshuck’, but we spell it ‘taoiseach.’ We respect foreign spellings these days – a sign of our more egalitarian times, perhaps.
People know I’m from Ireland or have Irish roots.
I’m Irish, so I’m messing all the time. Which means, I’m having a laugh. I’m always making jokes.
Songs with simple lyrics really take off in Irish nightclubs.
My mother came from an Irish family of 11 kids and, of course, had a sister who was a nun, so I spent time at a convent and with an aunt and uncle who lived in New York and took me to the theater.
Irish poetry has lost the ready ear and the comforts of recognition. But we must go on. We must be true to our own minds.
I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious.
Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.
I think it’s best for me to kind of just plough on doing whatever interests me, just following my own whims, because otherwise, I would think, ‘Oh well, I have to write something now that really represents my generation or that really represents young Irish people.’
My Irish identity is important as it’s a part of who I am.
As an Irish person, there’s a historical fascination with America: America is the default green and promised land for Irish people and Italians; that’s what we grow up with.
I think Irish women are strong as horses, incredibly loyal and for the most part, funny, witty, bright and optimistic in the face of devastating reality.
It was a chance encounter with a biotech entrepreneur from Ireland that got me started as an entrepreneur in India, because I partnered this Irish company in setting up India’s first biotech company.
If there is a vote in Britain to leave the E.U. there is a democratic imperative to provide Irish citizens with the right to vote in a border poll to end partition and retain a role in the E.U.
In these days of our new materialistic Irish state, poetry will have a harder, less picturesque task. But the loss of Yeats and all that boundless activity, in a country where the mind is feared and avoided, leaves a silence which it is painful to contemplate.
You have the most amazing Irish actors. Cillian on ‘Peaky Blinders.’ And the most amazing actress.
People ask me where I’m from. I say Ireland, and they are like ‘Really? You don’t look Irish.’ Then you have to explain… people are intrigued, but sometimes you think, ‘Why do I have to tell my whole story every time I open my mouth?
Ninety percent I’ll spend on good times, women and Irish Whiskey. The other ten percent I’ll probably waste.
I always went to Ireland as a child. I remember trips to Dundalk, Wexford, Cork and Dublin. My gran was born in Dublin, and we had a lot of Irish friends, so we’d stay on their farms and go fishing. They were fantastic holidays – being outdoors all day and coming home to a really warm welcome in the evenings.
I find being Irish quite a wearing thing. It takes so much work because it is a social construction. People think you are going to be this, this, and this.
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.
My dad lives in Sicily, so I’m half Italian and half Irish – it’s a fiery combination.
The working classes in England were always sentimental, and the Irish and Scots and Welsh. The upper-class English are the stiff-upper-lipped ones. And the middle class. They’re the ones who are crippled emotionally because they can’t move up, and they’re desperate not to move down.
I spent my entire Irish Catholic youth in a constant state of guilt over imaginary sins. I learned that nothing is a sin as long as you don’t take pleasure from it.
I grew up in a predominantly Caucasian neighborhood, but my mom is Filipino-Spanish and my dad is Irish.
I had wanted to write English crime novels based on the American hard-boiled style, and for the first two novels about Brixton, the critics didn’t actually know I was Irish.
I grew up listening to a lot of player-piano music in my house and a lot of old Tin Pan Alley songs and American standards. My dad listened to a lot of traditional Irish music and I grew up doing musical theater. So most of the music I was exposed to as a kid was pre-rock n’ roll.
If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.
I like the Mid Antrim circuit, and if anyone were to ask me to show them a typical Irish road surface, I would take them to the Mid Antrim. It is awesome.
I did the same thing as every Irish person who comes to New York. I arrived on a Wednesday, and by Saturday night, I was pulling pints at a pub in the Bronx.
I had grown up as an Irish poet in a country where the distance between vision and imagination was not quite as wide as in some other countries.
My mother is Italian and my dad’s Irish. In my family, we’re expressive. Nobody holds back.
Though my grandmother had picked up modern ideas in America, she still had some conflicting 19th-century Irish notions. She believed that daughters, educated though they may be, should continue to live at home until they were married.
My soul is still Irish.
My uncle was a photographer for ‘The Irish Times.’
When I was young, I struggled with authorship: with everything the word meant and failed to mean. Irish poetry was heavy with custom. Sometimes at night, when I tried to write, a ghost hand seemed to hold mine. Where could my life, my language fit in?
The Irish people were willing to take me at face value, to give me the benefit of the doubt because I was a Kennedy. I think being a Kennedy was extremely helpful.
I am a political prisoner. I am a political prisoner because I am a casualty of a perennial war that is being fought between the oppressed Irish people and an alien, oppressive, unwanted regime that refuses to withdraw from our land.
The Danes and the Irish have a great simpatico, that’s for sure.
My mum and my husband are from Irish backgrounds, so we have a lot of potatoes. Chips, mashed, boiled, new potatoes, I love them all. Even the slightly wonky ones like Duchess potatoes that go up in a little spiral.
I am an Irish person. I’m an Irishman, but I’m also an Ulsterman.
As a working-class boy, golf was never really on my radar, and when I was growing up, Irish football was my sporting passion.
The most shocking fact about Summer Bay is not that it looks so much like Brittas Bay. It is that it seems to be almost exclusively populated with Irish people.
I wrote a script. I actually enjoyed writing it more than acting. It’s about the Irish rebellion of 1920, which is a fascinating period and place for me.
There is something restless and curious about the Irish. Like everybody else, we want to make money and make our way in the world but it’s not the be all and end all. We also want to have fun, we want to make friends, make connections, share stories.
U2 and Sinead O’Connor – I haven’t a clue why we’re compared to them. Apart from us all being Irish, we’ve nothing in common.
My father was a typical Irish father. He was a nice, hard working, driven guy. His politics were very conservative and I was just a very different kind of kid to that. I was very shy and bookish.
My dad is Irish. I spent my childhood going back and forth between Ireland and America.
It was impossible for me to believe that conditions in Europe could be worse than they were in the Polish section of Chicago, and in many Italian and Irish tenements, or that any workshops could be worse than some of those I had seen in our foreign quarters.
Finally, Colin Farrell showed up on my doorstep, only he wasn’t Colin Farrell – he was just this Irish kid who had read the script and wanted to do it.
Most of my jokes are racist – usually about the Irish.
Like a lot of Irish households we read a lot of Irish history. It was almost Soviet, raising the next generation with a mythic view of their history.
In old times people used to try and square the circle; now they try and devise schemes for satisfying the Irish nation.
Thomas Young was born in 1731 in upstate New York. The child of impoverished Irish immigrants, he grew up in a log cabin without the benefit of a formal education. But he was an avid reader who began collecting books at a young age and eventually amassed one of the finest personal libraries in New England.
