Brian Friel 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.

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.

The external reality and inner dynamic of happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1974 were symptomatic of change, violent change admittedly, but change nevertheless, and for the minority living there, change had been long overdue.

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

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.

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

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.

Belfast during the Troubles looked like a different world.

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

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.

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.

It's an extraordinary thing, this tiny little province of Northern Ireland, where carnage happened. And I was part of it. I grew up in it.

The gun is not out of Irish politics.

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.

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

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.

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

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

If India wants her bloodbath, she shall have it.

Both sides are slaughtering each other as they scream ‘Allahu akbar …. I say let Allah sort it out.

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.