Quotes About Ireland

This is why Stephen tells the fatuous Englishman, Haines, that the Irish artist is the servant of two masters—the imperial British State and the Roman Catholic Church. In this sense also, the dead live: the Irish writer of Joyce's day made his obedience to the dead invaders and traitors who made Ireland a colony of Rome and of England, or else he was forced to choose Joyce's path of exile: as did Shaw and O'Casey and Beckett and a dozen lesser lights along with Joyce.

Colombians have been dealing with cocaine since your ancestors were running around Ireland with their bodies painted blue," Kingsley said.

My relationship to all my family in Ireland is more to family as a whole. It wasn't that we had a very specific one-on-one relationship.

Catholicism is more than a religion, it is a political power. Therefore I'm led to believe there will be no peace in Ireland until the Catholic Church is crushed

No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland, but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove.

I grew up in Ireland, so I do not have a lot of respect for most politicians.

For example, the chief goddess of Celtic Ireland prior to the coming of Christianity was Brigid. When Ireland was Christianised, Brigid too was baptised. She became St Brigit, who to this day is the most revered saint in Catholic Ireland.

Los santos cristianos no solo se parecían a los antiguos dioses politeístas, sino que a menudo eran los mismos dioses disfrazados. Por ejemplo, la diosa principal de la Irlanda céltica anterior a la llegada del cristianismo era Brígida. Cuando Irlanda fue cristianizada, Brígida fue asimismo bautizada, convirtiéndose en santa Brígida, la santa más venerada en la Irlanda católica hasta la actualidad.

Our national poet WB Yeats said that every Irish writer had a decision to take: whether to express Ireland or exploit it. In his day, the choice lay between expressing the nation to itself or exploiting it for the amused condescension of a mainly overseas audience. Holding a mirror up to the people was a risky business: many, seeing an unflattering image, were inclined to smash the glass in anger.

What's a Dullahan?' 'He's a headless horseman, in the service of the banshee.' 'Headless?' 'Yes.' 'Seriously?' 'Yes.' 'So he has no head?' 'That's usually what headless means.' 'No head at all?' 'You're really getting hung up on this headless thing, aren't you?' 'It's just kind of silly, even for us.' 'Yet you spend your days with a living skeleton.' 'But at least he has a head.' 'True.' 'He even has a spare.

The Engineer smiled (internally, for of course it had no mouth). It was feeling good. It was feeling optimistic. Moving at its current speed, it would arrive back in Ireland in plenty of time to shut everything down before a series of overloads and power loops inevitably led to a sequence of events which would, in turn, eventually lead to the probable destruction of the world. The Engineer wasn't worried. And then the truck hit it.

aureole of Saint Patrick banishing snakes

Half the country wouldn't have died if the landlords hadn't kept shipping away the corn, seizing cattle, rack-renting, evicting, torching cabins…Or if the government at Westminster hadn't thought it the most prudent course of action to sit on their arses and let the Irish starve.

It would not be like a movie. It would be like life in Ireland: cold and hard and with no happy ending.

To attempt to write about Dun Aengus and bring some sort of freshness to it is rather like trying to perform a similar service for Stonehenge: so many people have attempted it before that one is tempted to give up what one is looking at is not only one of the wonders of Ireland, but of the entire Western world.

There's a dear little plant that grows in our isle, 'Twas St Patrick himself, sure, that set it; And the sun on his labor with pleasure did smile, And with dew from his eye often wet it. It thrives through the bog, through the brake, and the mireland; And he called it the dear little shamrock of Ireland...

You pick up loads of baggage with your first record with reaction to it from fans and critics. So I went to Ireland by myself for a couple of weeks with my guitar. I read lots of poetry, I read Patti Smith's autobiography and started words and phrases and then songs started to take shape.

I'm not privy to the English set-up, but at the academies in Ireland, there is a huge focus on the weights room as opposed to whether they can throw a 10-metre pass on the run. They should be rugby players becoming athletes, not athletes becoming rugby players.

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.

A harrassed and dubious childhood under the hand of a well-meaning but barbarous mother's help from County Armagh led me to think of the North of Ireland as prison and the South as a land of escape.

Mum is from West Waterford, Dungarvan. She's a farmer's daughter. She's a nurse. She left home very young - I think she was 18 - and went off to train as a nurse in England. My dad is from India, just south of Mumbai. He was one of the first in his family to go to college, and he went to England in the '70s; he emigrated there.

I'll tell you what, it doesn't get more beautiful than the west of Ireland. Connemara and County Derry are quite stunning, really.

Irish writing is so strong that it can feel like the country has all been covered, but in fact, there are so many gaps. The small west of Ireland cities and the working classes there have almost never appeared in Irish literature, simply because those communities were never in the way of producing books.

When I was a senior in high school, I went to Ireland to study Irish Gaelic. And after one semester at Trinity College, I went way out to the west coast of Ireland and rented a little house by myself.