To be honest, I'm a bit of a snob now; give me a Four Seasons anywhere in the world and I'm happy. Also, they've just opened a Ritz-Carlton in County Wicklow, Ireland, which is stunning and has great views.
Thomas Davis was a great man where poetry is concerned, and a better than Thomas Moore. All over Ireland his poetry is, and he would have done other things but that he died young.
I've got an Avalon guitar - that's the company that used to be Lowden. They come out of Ireland, and they're like these folk kind of guitars. You can pick 'em, you can strum 'em - they're quite good.
When I started acting, there were parts in English that I thought I just had to try it out and go to another country. I did a film in Ireland. It was my first film abroad.
I'm not a comic person at all. It never reached me in the north of Ireland, in the '60s and '70s growing up. We used to get stupid comics like 'The Topper' and 'The Beezer,' things like that.
I have a theory about Ireland, being at the edge of Europe. For 1,000 years, people didn't know what was beyond. But we thought about it - a lot. And that 'beyond' became internalized in our psyche.
I don't buy into the idea that an Irish writer should write about Ireland, or a gay writer should write about being gay.
Indeed, American companies make three times as much profits from their investment in one E.U. country, Ireland, than they do from all their investments in China.
I do identify with St. Patrick, not just in name. He drove the snakes out of Ireland. I intend to drive the snakes out of the State House.
I have lived in countries that were coming out of conflict: Ireland, South Africa, the Czech republic. People there are overflowing with energy.
After the spiritual powers, there is no thing in the world more unconquerable than the spirit of nationality. The spirit of nationality in Ireland will persist even though the mightiest of material powers be its neighbor.
Iceland, though it lies so far to the north that it is partly within the Arctic Circle, is, like Norway, Scotland, and Ireland, affected by the Gulf Stream, so that considerable portions of it are quite habitable.
What I discovered all over Ireland is that people living simple lives by the sea or in the remote countryside seem a lot calmer than city folk with their iPads and their Android phones.
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.
I love our shared island, our shared Ireland and its core decency. I love it for its imagination and its celebration of the endless possibilities for our people.
Ireland is such a young society. The British were the ruling class up until they left about a hundred years ago, and we've been trying to work out what our class hierarchy is ever since.
Australia integrated the - brought on the ships and unleashed in the society the dogs of sectarianism, which had existed in other places - in Glasgow, in Liverpool and of course in Ireland, north and south.
I've only been to Ireland once, and I felt I would wake up with voices in my head, almost like music, and that if I were a songwriter, I would be very inspired.
Some mornings you wake up and think, gee I look handsome today. Other days I think, what am I doing in the movies? I wanna go back to Ireland and drive a forklift.
I'm very keenly aware that there aren't very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way.
