Top 77 Northern Ireland Quotes

We’ll be launching the new public prosecution service in Northern Ireland tomorrow. I’ll be doing it in Belfast tomorrow. This is an entirely new era, in which criminal justice now exercised on an equal basis, not the old basis in which community division was a feature.

I was born in Northern Ireland, also known as Ulster, and I’m Scots-Irish, therefore.

You know, the pessimism which exists now in the Middle East existed in Northern Ireland, but we stayed at it.

How can I intimidate Tiger Woods? I mean, the guy’s got 75 or whatever PGA Tour wins, 14 majors. He’s been the biggest thing ever in our sport. How could some little 23-year-old from Northern Ireland with a few wins come up and intimidate him.

Funnily enough, Northern Ireland is a great example of where politics can win over conflict. The decision to down arms and follow a political path would have been unthinkable once. It shows just what is possible.

I am a proud product of Irish golf and the Golfing Union of Ireland and am hugely honoured to have come from very rich Irish sporting roots… I am also a proud Ulsterman who grew up in Northern Ireland. That is my background and always will be.

In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.

A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.

The reality is that no Brexit deal can be achieved if Northern Ireland is never allowed to leave the Customs Union.

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.

My dad grew up in Banbridge, Northern Ireland, desperate to get to London. I grew up in London, so I don’t know what it’s like to yearn for the big city from a small town.

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.

If you sit down with British officers or British senior NCOs, they understand the sweep of history. They know the history of British forces not just in Afghanistan but the history of British successful counter-insurgencies – Northern Ireland, Malaysia.

I was in and about the Northern Ireland team, I was a young boy, an up and coming star in the team!

Northern Ireland has a unique place in the Union. As the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement enshrined in law, the people of Northern Ireland can be British, Irish or neither.

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.

I’ve always been fascinated with Ireland, especially Northern Ireland, having lived in London in the ’80s when there was an Irish republican bombing campaign there.

On the Northern Ireland question, for instance, the British and Irish governments prohibit media contact with members of the IRA, but we have always gone ahead, believing in the right to information.

Both the U.K. and the E.U. have made a sincere commitment to the people of Northern Ireland: there will be no hard border. Equally, as a U.K. government, we could not countenance a future in which a border was drawn in the Irish Sea, separating Northern Ireland from the rest of the U.K.

Carrickmacross always had a border mentality. Smuggling would have been a big thing there in the past; there would have been spillover from the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

But if I ever fight in Northern Ireland again, I want it to be at Windsor Park.

I hope the unionist parties, for example, who would be keen to protect and preserve the Union would see that it’s much easier to do that if the U.K. stays within the Customs Union and the Single Market, because that would take away the need for any special arrangement, or bespoke solution, for Northern Ireland.

My parents were Northern Ireland Labour party people. We read the ‘Guardian’ and the ‘New Statesman,’ listened to the BBC. The house was full of books. We didn’t get a television until ‘That Was The Week That Was’ started. There was nothing to do but read.

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, ‘Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don’t believe?

My point is there’s a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It’s a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.

Northern Ireland, England, Scotland – when we play each other, you don’t want to lose to a neighbouring country.

John Irwin became one of the greatest peace workers in Northern Ireland.

It’s an extraordinary thing, this tiny little province of Northern Ireland, where carnage happened. And I was part of it. I grew up in it.

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.

The pursuit of an extreme Brexit cannot come at the cost of peace in Northern Ireland.

We are the Conservative and Unionist party. No Conservative would do anything to harm the union, and that crucially includes Northern Ireland.

There’s been many highs throughout my international career which I’ll always remember with fondness, including my debut against Northern Ireland, winning two international player of the year awards, and my hat-trick in Malta.

Queen’s University flies the flag for the arts in Northern Ireland and beyond.

Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.

It was easy for some to jump on the Brexit result and use it to make a land-grab for Northern Ireland, and it was counterproductive.

My sights have always been on acting, on the creative process, never the lifestyle. Growing up in Northern Ireland when I did, everything was against you if you wanted to do something like that. But I was determined.

In Britain, politicians who openly discuss their spirituality are about as welcome as Jehovah’ s Witnesses on the doorstep, and the British associate the mixture of politics and religion as a heady cocktail best reserved for the mass irrationality of Northern Ireland, Iran, Kashmir, and the Middle East.

I grew up in Northern Ireland, in the middle of nowhere, and when you are poor, you are really poor. And when you are rich, you are very rich. This is not a new phenomenon.

It’s Northern Ireland, it’s Ireland, it’s Scotland, it’s Wales, there’s Scousers, Londoners, all behind me.

The basic policy of the British Government was that since the majority of people in Northern Ireland wished to remain in the United Kingdom, that was that. We asked what would happen if the majority wanted something else, if the majority wanted to see Irish unity.

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.

We really need to come behind and press for marriage equality in Northern Ireland.

No-one wants to see a return to the hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland.

Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland – it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.

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.

Because Scotland and Northern Ireland want to remain part of the E.U., there is the quite real possibility that Scotland and even Northern Ireland might now choose to go their own way on membership within the E.U. and the ‘United Kingdom’ would suddenly effectively be only England and Wales.

There are two traditions in Northern Ireland. There are two main religious denominations. But there is only one true moral denomination. And it wants peace.

In my teens, I joined the Parachute Regiment. I jumped out of lots of airplanes, as much as the Government budget would allow us to. I did two active tours of duty: Northern Ireland, and then the Falklands war.

I loved my time growing up in Northern Ireland doing youth drama, that is where it all began for me.

As a guy from Northern Ireland who supported Celtic and worked in football, I’m living my dream here.

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.

On my Wikipedia page, it used to say I was born in Belfast, Ireland, then it said Belfast, Northern Ireland, and then it said Belfast, U.K. So there was a little war going on about where Belfast is located.

In Northern Ireland, I truly, effortlessly, knew who I was. I knew where I belonged. I felt completely and utterly secure.

The reality of life in Northern Ireland is that if you were Protestant, you learned British history, and if you were Catholic, you learned Irish history in school.

The big missing part of the jig-saw is to get the assembly back up and running here in Northern Ireland, to get shared government back in business, that is my objective, and we await the IRA statement to see if this will trigger a new dawn.

That feeds anger, and I mean when we went and at last thank heavens got towards peace in Northern Ireland we went for justice within Northern Ireland as well as using security well, as well as a political settlement, but surely that is the lesson.

I’ve got my roots in Northern Ireland – my biological father’s side of the family were from Belfast.

Dragged out of your bed at the age of seven, my mother screaming, six kids under the age of 12. I’m not equating my experience with the people who lived in Northern Ireland. But my dad was always out and about late at night, and I could not go to sleep until I knew he was in.

Quite simply, I maintained contact with Sinn Fein and believed that there had to be a political, not a military, solution to the situation in Northern Ireland.

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.

While the E.U. Withdrawal Act ensures that Brexit will work for all the devolved nations and our U.K. devolution settlements, the special requirements of Northern Ireland, which uniquely shares a land border with another E.U. member state, present a more formidable challenge.

When the problems in Northern Ireland started, it was not a question of Protestantism or Catholicism, because the Catholic church was the only church at that time-it was a nationalist conflict.

A Canada-style deal for the whole of the UK results in a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. For that reason, it has never been acceptable to the EU without a permanent hard border down the Irish Sea.

Men, once enemies, are now jointly governing in Northern Ireland. And although there have been several hitches, by and large it’s working well.

I’m involved in Northern Ireland Screen and have been for a long time, so I keep my eyes open and ears to the ground.

Ever since I left Northern Ireland, I’ve always been pretty comfortable on my own, which contradicts a lot of people’s perceptions of me.

I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.

My father was from Northern Ireland, and coming from somewhere like that, your faith defines you. That’s something we don’t really understand outside Northern Ireland, but because of my parents and grandparents, I’ve experienced it.

If Northern Ireland is in one customs regime and the Republic of Ireland is in another, why won’t a customs border be necessary, just as happens with every other land border of this type?

My dad was a keen actor when he was young; my auntie is heavily involved in amateur dramatics back in Northern Ireland, and my great aunt was a woman called Greer Garson.

I’ve never put Northern Ireland into a novel because it’s not my territory. I come from the South, so my imaginative territory is very much the Republic of Ireland rather than the North. Even though, if I wrote a novel about the North, it might sell more.

The people of Northern Ireland have sorted out my whole life.

We’re nondenominational. I come from Northern Ireland, and we’ve had religious wars for years. I didn’t want to create an illusion that my God is better than your God. So our show is a spiritual show, not a religious show.

Northern Ireland has treated me well, you know?

‘Game of Thrones’ was a game-changer for Northern Ireland. There’s going to be a massive gap when it goes.

You can get on with your job. I’m going to get on with mine. And mine is to deliver for the people of Northern Ireland, that’s what they expect from me and I’m not going to be deflected by interesting academic or media speculation or attempts to take the whole debate back.

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.