Quotes About Irish

My parents are both from Belfast. I have an Irish passport and a British passport, and I go back every summer and every Christmas, and sometimes I pop over during the year to say hi, and, of course, celebrate St. Patrick's Day.

Growing up, I was your classic Catholic Irish kid. I went to mass every Sunday. Then in secondary school I went to boarding school, and there was mass seven days a week before breakfast - it may have put me off!

Being Irish, I grew up eating a Sunday roast.

This is the kind of life I've had. Drunk, and in charge of a bicycle, as an Irish police report once put it. Drunk with life, that is, and not knowing where off to next. But you're on your way before dawn. And the trip? Exactly one half terror, exactly one half exhilaration.

I saw that most of the Irish I met had a variety of ways of making do with that dreadful beast Reality. You can run into it head-on, which is a dire business, or you can skirt around it, give it a poke, dance for it, make up a song, write you a tale, prolong the gab, fill up the flask. Each partakes of Irish cliché, but each, in the foul weather and the foundering politics, is true.

To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.

In the era of security clearances, to be an Irish Catholic became prima facie evidence of loyalty. Harvard men were to be checked; Fordham men would do the checking.

My dad was a labourer and my mum had exactly the same job as Noel Gallagher's mum - she was a dinner lady at our local school. Everyone comes over from Ireland and they get the same jobs.

Otell me all aboutAnna Livia! I want to hear allabout Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now.

No, men and women of the Irish race, we shall not fight for England. We shall fight for the destruction of the British Empire and the construction of an Irish republic.

Together they would shift the focus of Catholic activism in the city from militant anticommunism to a much more perilous internal critique of the Irish waterfront and its powerful code of silence.

By the late nineteenth century the dazzlingly multiethnic character of the now great metropolis echoed the diverse origins of its earliest European explorers, but only one group knew the port as their place. For if the port made New York, the Irish made the port.

The three-and-a-half-week walkout "had little effect on Britain's decision to grant Ireland independence," wrote Bruce Nelson, but it did lead to the integration—if short-lived—of African Americans into the Chelsea Piers workforce, the experience of diaspora and oppression briefly uniting black and Irish dockworkers "who had long regarded each other with suspicion and even hatred.

The lords of the waterfront evinced little or no interest in their ancestral homeland, though their story makes for a meaningful chapter in the saga of the Irish diaspora.

Between Hell's Kitchen and Greenwich Village lay Chelsea, the heart and soul of the Irish waterfront.

Jersey City's railroads were built by Irish immigrants, men from Con-naught and Munster who dug a crucial tunnel through the Palisades in the late 1850s, linking waterfront rail terminals with tracks laid in the meadow-lands to the west and the vast continent that lay beyond.

The claim staked on the world's richest piers by a vast cadre of Irish American longshoremen was akin to a hereditary birthright.

The ubiquity of alcoholism in Chelsea and neighboring Irish waterfront communities can scarcely be overstated:

A "skinny kid from Hoboken" named Frank Sinatra helped bring an end to the Irish waterfront's golden age.

Tuned to the din, O'LiamRoe and his deerhound heard the footfalls at once. Shaggy brindle next to hispid gold, the two Irish heads turned as Thady Boy Ballagh strolled over the grass.

A lot of Irish people perform. They perform in drawing rooms. They sing songs and they play piano.

I'm more of a Smithwick's or Bulmer's girl than a pint of Guinness.

I wasn't close to my father, but I wanted to be all my life. He had a funny sense of humor, and he laughed all the time - good and loud, like I do. He was a gay Irish gentleman and very good-looking. And he wanted to be close to me, too, but we never had much time together.

There was a big thing in the Behan family of achieving and wanting to be something special. There was a big drive in the family, even though it was poor and working class, to do something important, to contribute something to Irish culture. He certainly achieved that in a spectacular way.