So many Irish actors overplay that modesty because they're afraid people will judge them and say, 'The state of yer man, he thinks he's great,' or whatever.
Before the Great Chicago Fire, no one took notice of Patrick and Catherine O'Leary, two Irish immigrants who lived with their five children on the city's West Side.
The Butcher Boy is a very great novel indeed and a very important Irish novel. The ambiguity of that is, he's writing a book about an appalling situation and he does it in a hilarious way.
But I will say that living in Ireland has changed the cadence and fullness of speech, since the Irish love words and use as many of them in a sentence as possible.
I would love to play a British character one day. My accent wavers between Scottish and Irish very easily, though.
I go to Spain a lot, in winter, for a blast of sunlight to banish the blues brought on by the Irish greys and drizzle. I love the cities of the Spanish interior.
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.
Plays by people like Martin McDonagh and Brian Friel attract huge audiences, not because they're Irish, but because they're brilliant plays.
Gerald O'Hara: It will come to you, this love of the land. There's no gettin' away from it if you're Irish.
Violence and irrationality were so long and thoroughly cultivated among the Irish, and so perfectly ingrained into their nature, that modern civilization has as yet been unable to extract the virus.
But if republicans are to prevail, if the peace process is to be successfully concluded and Irish sovereignty and re-unification secured, then we have to set the agenda - no-one else is going to do that.
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.
I grew up mostly with classical, big band, and a lot of Irish music - I really didn't start listening to rock and roll until I was maybe sixteen.
Hats are the epitome of Englishness, and a royal wedding is the penultimate moment for a hat designer. I'm Irish, but I am a royalist and I believe in fantasy.
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.
The ultimate goal of the political elite is to privatize the air. So as not to destroy their own edifice of democratic compassion they will make provisions for the sick and the poor. Air will be rationed by a privatized bureaucracy and only those who...
Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal. From an Irish headstone
Cause I'm Irish, and everyone remembers me.
I'm proud to be a Mick, even though I'm not Irish My middle name is Mickey, though. Actually, I’m lying.
I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious.
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.
