Barry Keoghan Quotes

The Irish are people who will never have leaders, for at the great moment they always desert them. They have produced one skeleton--Parnell--never a man.

I'm Irish as hell: Kelly on one side, Shanley on the other. My father had been born on a farm in the Irish Midlands. He and his brothers had been shepherds there, cattle and sheep, back in the early 1920s. I grew up surrounded by brogues and Irish music, but stayed away from the old country till I was over 40. I just couldn't own being Irish.

The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.

Irishness is not primarily a question of birth or blood or language; it is the condition of being involved in the Irish situation, and usually of being mauled by it.

Patrick Pearse - who set the events of 1916 in motion when he read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic from the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin - is not exactly an unfamiliar name to the Miramichi Irish.

Oh Ireland my first and only love Where Christ and Caesar are hand in glove!

My kids are Irish; I want them to grow up playing Gaelic football and learning Irish.

My father was totally Irish, and so I went to Ireland once. I found it to be very much like New York, for it was a beautiful country, and both the women and men were good-looking.

I'm Irish, yeah, but I don't need to get up on a soapbox about it.

I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true.

Madam President, speaking here in Dublin Castle it is impossible to ignore the weight of history, as it was yesterday when you and I laid wreaths at the Garden of Remembrance.

Ireland is a series of stories that have been told to us, starting with the Irish Celtic national revival. I never believed in 'Old Ireland.' It has been made all of kitsch by the diaspora, looking back and deciding what Ireland is. Yes, it is green. Yes, it is friendly. I can't think of anything else for definite.

There's something about the Irish that is remarkable.

I'm proud to be Irish.

We would not give up our own country - Ireland - if we were to get the whole world as an estate, and the Country of the Young along with it.

I would love to write the story of my upbringing in Ireland.

I always gravitate towards anything from Ireland. With Irish lit, I love the use of language, but also in many instances, the Irish writers are writing about people and circumstances that I can relate to.

… the annihilation of Ireland.

I have been brought up amongst the Irish people. I was reared in a laborers cottage here in Ireland. I have not lived soley amongst the intellectuals—whever I wanted to know what the Irish people wanted, I had only to examine my own heart and it told me straight away what the Irish people wanted.

The spirt of 1916 is as relevant and inspiring today as it was a century ago.

People who think I have insulted Ireland or Limerick or my family have not read the book!

I have enormous respect for people who come from a strong family background in Fine Gael.

My Irish identity is important as it's a part of who I am.

Ireland is not at all a simple place, and in many ways it is spare and sad. It has no wealth, no power, no stability, no influence, no fashion, no size. Its only real arts are song and drama and poem. But Limerick alone has two thousand ruined castles and surely that many practicing poets.

Irish nationalists can never be the assenting parties to the mutilation of the Irish nation. The two nation theory is to us an abomination and a blasphemy.