I went further and further back through the centuries to get a sense of perspective but now at least I understand why Irish history evokes such strong passions and emotions.
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.
My dad was a very funny man - he's the one who taught me life would be awfully hard without humor! I'm sure his Irish wit in some way influenced my decision to become an actress.
My brother and I were born in an Irish county called Tipperary. We were both very math- and science-inclined in high school. My dad trained as an electrical engineer, and my mom is in microbiology.
Most boys' first hero is their father. That was definitely true of my dad. He was a proud Irish American and he taught me a lot about ethics and responsibility. He also introduced me to a lot of wonderful folk music.
There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it.
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 think now, more than anytime I can remember, bands are sounding pretty similar whether they're English or American, from Manchester or London... or Leeds or Welsh or Irish.
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!
I don't buy into the idea that an Irish writer should write about Ireland, or a gay writer should write about being gay.
I was the adoring son of a Welsh-Irish father, a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, a Catholic Knight of Columbus who was a blue-collar, trade union organizer and, not surprisingly, a fervid Nixon-hater.
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.
I'm born and raised in the Northeast. My parents are Irish immigrants. So our tendency is to shy away from the big yellow ball that comes up in the sky every once in a while.
My father's parents were Irish. Only a year before my father died, he and I went back to Ireland for a week to look at the old homestead.
They believed that Britain was in Ireland defending their own interests, therefore the Irish had the right to use violence to put them out. My argument was that that type of thinking was out of date.
[after someone speaks to him in Irish Gaelic] Boss Tweed: They don't speak English in New York any more?
Longshanks: Not the archers. My scouts tell me their archers are miles away and no threat to us. Arrows cost money. Use up the Irish. The dead cost nothing.
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.
Americans may say they love our accents (I have been accused of sounding 'like Princess Di') but the more thoughtful ones resent and rather dislike us as a nation and people, as friends of mine have found out by being on the edge of conversations whe...
How did your mother die?” asked Delk. “Car accident,” Katie replied, gazing out over the water. “She’d been to mass. A tire blew on the way home, and she was gone. I was nineteen, Pather’s age, when it happened. My brother was only eleven...
It was Chase who had obtained the information from the girl’s boyfriend during a party in an Irish pub, simply by using his British friendliness and charm.
