Quotes on Irish

When I was young, I struggled with authorship: with everything the word meant and failed to mean. Irish poetry was heavy with custom. Sometimes at night, when I tried to write, a ghost hand seemed to hold mine. Where could my life, my language fit in?

I grew up in the middle of a block where there was an Irish grocery store on one corner, an Italian bar on another corner and the Nazi Party was on the third corner.

I'm a product of my Irish culture, and I could no more lose that than I could my sense of identity.

Poetry is not Irish or any other nationality; and when writers such as Messrs. Clarke, Farren and the late F. R. Higgins pursue Irishness as a poetic end, they are merely exploiting incidental local colour.

I had grown up as an Irish poet in a country where the distance between vision and imagination was not quite as wide as in some other countries.

I'm not a walking extra in a Chekhov play; I'm no Slavic gloom or Irish gloom.

Either somebody has equal rights, or they don't. And certainly in the Irish constitution, marriage is genderless. There's no mention of a man and a woman.

I had moments with my father that were exquisite - the stories he told me about Cuchulain, the mythological Irish warrior, are still magical to me.

There are writers, and I know some of them, who are very disciplined. Who write, like, four pages a day, every day. And it doesn't matter if their dog got run over by a car that day, or they won the Irish sweepstakes. I'm not one of those writers.

I had studied Irish history. I had read speeches from the dock. I had tried to fuse the vivid past of my nation with the lost spaces of my childhood. I had learned the battles, the ballads, the defeats. It never occurred to me that eventually the power and insistence of a national tradition would offer me only a new way of not belonging.

They won't break me because the desire for freedom, and the freedom of the Irish people, is in my heart.

You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.