Liam Neeson Quotes

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.

I grew up during one of Northern Ireland's most complex periods.

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.

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.

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.

Belfast during the Troubles looked like a different world.

I was a child during the Lebanese civil war, and I remember Israeli bombardments. So growing up, my view of Israel was completely negative. I'm not coming from a neutral place, but with time, I've had to re-examine my thinking.

They want to derail peace because they want to plunge Northern Ireland back into armed conflict.

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.

It's time for the IRA to go out of business.

I've never read anything set in Belfast that doesn't involve the Troubles or something senseless over a flag.

You could count on the fingers of one hand the number of people in the north who said to me, 'When did you leave the IRA?'

The picture of Prince Charles meeting Gerry Adams is inexpressibly sad.

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.

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.

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

Of course, violence will not end with our combat mission. Extremists will continue to set off bombs, attack Iraqi civilians and try to spark sectarian strife. But ultimately, these terrorists will fail to achieve their goals.

In coming to that agreement, my party had a clear philosophy throughout. In Northern Ireland, we should have institutions that respected the differences of the people and that gave no victory to either side.

The big missing part of the jig-saw is to get the assembly back up and running here in Northern Ireland, to get shared government back in business, that is my objective, and we await the IRA statement to see if this will trigger a new dawn.

I believe we've spent many years trying to bring about talks which have all the Parties in Northern Ireland involved so that there'd be inclusive talks.

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

There is not a single injustice in Northern Ireland that is worth the loss of a single British soldier or a single Irish citizen either.

My job now, as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, is to take this process forward, and that I'm determined to do, whatever old clippings you dig out and whatever old quotes you put before me.

But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.