Irish Cultural Heritage Quotes

I'm a fanatic about Irish music. I love its moody, modal and timeless quality. I'm different from some other composers, because I don't look at this as just a job. I think of music as art.

I'm proud of my Irish heritage and culture.

But let's just say, I'm Irish. I grew up in the 1950s. Religion had a very tight iron fist.

I published my first book in 1982 - a collection of Irish folklore called Irish Folk & Fairy Tales. It is still in print today. My first young adult book was published a couple of years later, and I've been writing in both genres ever since.

In England especially, poetry's woven into the background fabric of society. And in Ireland, it's in the foreground. The place of the poet in Irish society is enormous. If you say you're a poet in Ireland, you'd better know what you're doing, because the standard and the expectations are incredibly high.

Throughout my childhood, I did a form of Irish dancing that was kind of the precursor to 'Riverdance.' It was a mixture of ballet and Irish dancing that my teacher, Patricia Mulholland, had invented, essentially. It was Irish ballet, and she would create performances based around the myths and legends of Ireland.

Ireland is a land of poets and legends, of dreamers and rebels. All of these have music woven through and around them. Tunes for dancing or for weeping, for battle or for love.

The English playwrights of the '50s and '60s didn't really keep writing or getting produced, while the Irish did. There's encouragement for the younger ones also in the fact that Ireland is exceptional in its ability to make theater part of the national dialogue, and it reaches to all four corners of the country.

Maud Gonne was - excuse me, Maud Gonne was central to the Gaelic literature revival. She wrote plays, and she sang.