Irish Society Quotes

For too long, Ireland has neglected its children.

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.

The Irish Free State was one of dozens of new European democracies to emerge from the cauldron of the 1914-1918 war. It was one of the very few that was still democratic in 1939. This book shows how the steely determination of one man, Kevin O'Higgins, made this possible. O'Higgins faced down mutinies in both the Gardai and the Army. He dissolved the Dáil Courts which were a parallel system that might easily have undermined the conventional courts. With WT Cosgrave, he put through a constitution which reconciled the local opponents of independence with the new State.

The Church controlled so much in Ireland for so long. I'm not going to get into whether or not religion per se is a bad thing, but my point is the political aspect in Ireland was way out of kilter, and it wasn't right.

Father Ted' would be impossible to remake it in America. The whole situation of being Irish and being a priest in Ireland is so different than anything else in America.

My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis.

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.

Yes, but also one of the problems for a novelist in Ireland is the fact that there are no formal manners. I mean some people have beautiful manners but there's no kind of agreed form of manners.

Politics is the chloroform of the Irish people, or rather the hashish.

Language is so important to the Irish, almost regardless of education.

I think it's safe to say that if you talk to anybody in Ireland, they'll have a passing knowledge of the guitar. It was something that I couldn't get away from when I was younger: guitars played in shops and parties, just everywhere.

In Ireland, novels and plays still have a strange force. The writing of fiction and the creation of theatrical images can affect life there more powerfully and stealthily than speeches, or even legislation. Imagined worlds can lodge deeply in the private sphere, dislodging much else, especially when the public sphere is fragile.

There can be no such things as an Irish nationalist accepting the loyalist veto and partition. You cannot claim to be an Irish nationalist if you consent to an internal six county settlement and if you are willing to negotiate the state of Irish society with a foreign government.

Amongst Women concentrated on the family, and the new book concentrates on a small community. The dominant units in Irish society are the family and the locality. The idea was that the whole world would grow out from that small space.

My job is to raise issues relating to class in Ireland.

Sir Patrick Rackrent lived and died a monument of old Irish hospitality.

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.

We have long had emigration in Ireland. But the nature of emigration has changed. With ferries to Britain and the continent, as well as air travel, emigration isn't the cut­off it used to be. In addition, some of our young people are being educated to levels beyond our present capacity to provide the jobs they are qualified to do. So they go abroad. Many want to come back, especially when they have children they would want to be raised in the Irish society and in the Irish educational system.