Paul Muldoon Quotes

My feet always danced to Irish traditional music, but I was very glad to get out of the North of Ireland in the mid-Seventies when it was really closed and tight and relentlessly unforgiving.

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

The people of Northern Ireland have sorted out my whole life.

Carrickmacross always had a border mentality. Smuggling would have been a big thing there in the past; there would have been spillover from the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

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.

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.

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.

I've had very good meetings with Unionist leaders, Democratic Unionist Party, Ian Paisley and his team.

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.

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.

The gun is not out of Irish politics.

I think a lot of us who grew up in Northern Ireland weren't politicised enough, frankly.

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.

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.

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.

It is obvious that the RUC is no longer accepted as an impartial police force.

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

A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.

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.

My father was from Northern Ireland, and coming from somewhere like that, your faith defines you. That's something we don't really understand outside Northern Ireland, but because of my parents and grandparents, I've experienced it.

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

Tony Blair has made a good contribution to the cause of peace in Ireland. He has made a great effort to understand it. He has great empathy with the need to resolve the conflict.