Ardal O'Hanlon Quotes

Northern Ireland still suffers from its past, and it will take generations to escape sectarianism and for violence to end totally. Nonetheless, it is in a different place now than during the Troubles, and it will not go back to the old days.

All my adult life, there was the Troubles. That was the backdrop of my life.

The Troubles are a pigmentation in our lives here, a constant irritation that detracts from real life. But life has to do with something else as well, and it's the other things which are the more permanent and real.

On the other hand, at some level the mass of unresolved issues in Northern Ireland does influence the fact that there are so many good writers in the place.

For a startling period of my life, I reported the Troubles in Ireland for the BBC. I lived in Dublin and was called out to all sorts of incidents that, if taken together, add up to a war - bombings, assassinations, riots, shootings, robberies, jailbreaks, kidnappings, and sieges.

Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can't be too optimistic.

The reality of life in Northern Ireland is that if you were Protestant, you learned British history, and if you were Catholic, you learned Irish history in school.

I am concerned that there's a cavalier attitude to the Irish Peace Process. What poor memories some have; I remember only too well the bag searches, the bomb scares and deaths. As they say, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

We used to spend a lot of time as kids in Northern Ireland, on the border and in southern Ireland as well.

We were raised right in the heart of the Bogside. Everything was so bad at the time that Mammy would bring us to the pantomime, circus, concerts because we were so confined at home.

I think people from Northern Ireland have some kind of unspoken general feeling of what it is to be around segregation. You have an awareness of it because you know how much grief it's caused.

Finland had a civil war less than 100 years ago, just like in Ireland. If you look at the history of newly independent nations, civil war is almost every time present, even in the United States.

Quite simply, I maintained contact with Sinn Fein and believed that there had to be a political, not a military, solution to the situation in Northern Ireland.

Belfast during the Troubles looked like a different world.

I grew up in Derry, of course, and it was - Derry was the worst example of Northern Ireland's discrimination.

Obviously one of the things that poets from Northern Ireland and beyond - had to try to make sense of was what was happening on a day-to-day political level.

My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.

We have lost a lot of ground to the extremists in the Middle East.

When the problems in Northern Ireland started, it was not a question of Protestantism or Catholicism, because the Catholic church was the only church at that time-it was a nationalist conflict.

Ireland and its people have much to be proud of. Yet every land and its people have moments of shame. Dealing with the failures of our past, as a country, as a Church, or as an individual is never easy. Our struggle to heal the wounds of decades of violence, injury and painful memory in Northern Ireland are more than ample evidence of this.

I mean I grew up in Ireland, so one would have to be consciously blinkered not to have reflected on the issue of political violence because that was the story since I was 19 years old or 20.

Jerusalem is a time bomb that I fear is just waiting to go off.

The basis on which the Good Friday agreement was constructed was in addressing those problems in the history of Northern Ireland, the social and constitutional problems as well as the military problems that have been unaddressed for centuries.

Well I think it has always been a mistake to reduce the peace process in Ireland to a decommissioning process.

Since the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland wants to remain a part of Great Britain, and since Ireland itself has shown little interest in reunification, the IRA's prospects for success through political channels have always been limited.