Despite an icy northeast wind huffing across the bay I sneak out after dark, after my mother falls asleep clutching her leather Bible, and I hike up the rutted road to the frosted meadow to...

What do we do if we come across trouble, sir?’ Cahill asked, slapping at a fly. ‘As much as I enjoy giving the rebel turds a walloping, it should be down to the Militia to...

History is an amazing presence–it is the place where vanished time gathers. While we are in the flow of time, it is difficult to glean its significance, and it is only in looking back that...

Though the last glimpse of Erin with sorrow I see,Yet wherever thou art shall seem Erin to me;In exile thy bosom shall still be my home,And thine eyes make my climate wherever we roam.

I make my way back whistling. Gerry nods towards Mrs Brady who is standing beside the trolleys.Morning, Mrs Brady, I say cheerfully.I push her provisions out to the car.Things are something terrible, she says. You...

Unification is less important than the fact Ireland is now conflict-free.

Go back to bed, Cowan. I want no promises from you.

There had been a time, until 1422, when a number of both Gaelic and Anglo-Irish students attended Oxford and Cambridge in England. But fellow students had complained that Irish living together in large numbers sooner...

dirty” before, I will compare it with dynamite in your ovaries. They say it with like, seven Rs.

In prehistoric times, early man was bowled over by natural events: rain, thunder, lightning, the violent shaking and moving of the ground, mountains spewing deathly hot lava, the glow of the moon, the burning heat...

Some ghosts are so quiet you would hardly know they were there.

God and religion before every thing!’ Dante cried. ‘God and religion before the world.’ Mr Casey raised his clenched fist and brought it down on the table with a crash.’Very well then,’ he shouted hoarsely,...

The History of Ireland in two words: Ah well. The Invasion by the Vikings: Ah well. The Invasion by the Normans. The Flight of the Earls, Mr Oliver Cromwell. Daniel O’Connell, Robert Emmett, The Famine,...

THAT crazed girl improvising her music.Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,Her soul in division from itselfClimbing, falling She knew not where,Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declareA beautiful lofty...

We were following Scotland rather than playing our own game and imposing our style on them and mastering them. We have to have a good analysis of the game before we play Ireland and work...

Poor Irish, but proud of it. I boarded the Titanic at Queenstown as a third class passenger with nothing more than the clothes on my back. And the law at my heels.” Titanic Rhapsody

A nation which fails to adequately remember salient points ofits own history, is like a person with Alzheimer’s. And that can be asocial disease of a most destructive nature.

This book tells my story. I’m writing it in Ireland, in a house on a hillside. The house sits low in the landscape between a holy well and the site of an Iron Age dwelling....

You too.” Then he was gone.And then I was sad.It was ridiculous. Preposterous, even. I was going to have to come clean about the ring- eventually. I hoped he didn’t bring it up because I...

Americans may say they love our accents (I have been accused of sounding ‘like Princess Di’) but the more thoughtful ones resent and rather dislike us as a nation and people, as friends of mine...

In Ireland, you go to someone’s house, and she asks you if you want a cup of tea. You say no, thank you, you’re really just fine. She asks if you’re sure. You say of...

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

The best thing about flying first class….was that you could be as nutty as a fruitcake and were still treated like the Queen of Sheba.

The Celt, and his cromlechs, and his pillar-stones, these will not change much – indeed, it is doubtful if anybody at all changes at any time. In spite of hosts of deniers, and asserters, and...

Who’re them?” says he to the curate.”Them are the fallen angels,” says the curate.They had a human form, no wings. God took the wings off of ’em after Lucifer rebelled – that way they couldn’t...

World is suddener than we fancy it.

We had found nothing, and had been lost several times already in one morning, so this was shaping up into a top travel experience.

I think being a woman is like being Irish… Everyone says you’re important and nice, but you take second place all the time.

They’d listen silenty, with grave faces: but once they’d turn to each other they’d smile cruelly. He couldn’t have it both ways. He’d put himself outside and outside they’d make him stay. Neither brutality nor...

Funny how I keep forgetting you’re insane.” – Colleen O’Brien

I wish it was accompanied by harp music so you could know that’s what was happening, but for me it’s that extra pause or that extra breath or that extra minute’s patience against all odds.”...

Be just before you are generous.

The tune was sad, as the best of Ireland was, melancholy and lovely as a lover’s tears.

Then the woman in the bed sat up and looked about her with wild eyes; and the oldest of the old men said: ‘Lady, we have come to write down the names of the immortals,’...

Until a few years ago, it was never as popular over there as it was here. But by this point, it has been commercialized and is a pretty big celebration in Ireland and England.

I try to clutch onto those last moments in the place that I was born to, but I was so busy *living* them! How was I to know I’d have to capture everything I ever...

That guy in the corner. Never tells the truth, as a matter of principle. Why answer a question, he says, if you can tell a good story instead?

a grin that wasn’t natural, and that combined in a strange way affection and arrogance, the arrogance of the idealist who doesn’t realize how easily he can be fooled.

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.

and…and…a gun. A big one.” – Colleen O’Brien

Michael and Luke met for the first time after 106 years – although the pair lived just 20 miles away from each other.

The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

In all of the possible scenarios Kian had envisioned, encountering a lunatic had not been one of them. It just showed him that he could never be completely prepared.

Early Summer, loveliest season, The world is being colored in. While daylight lasts on the horizon, Sudden, throaty blackbirds sing. The dusty-colored cuckoo cuckoos.”Welcome, summer” is what he says. Winter’s unimaginable. The wood’s a wickerwork...

I wish to be buried in Ireland, the country of my adoption a country which I loved, which I have dutifully served, and for which I believe I have sacrificed my life.

After a taste of a Scot, you’ll never look elsewhere again.”A brunette smiled seductively, “That’s quite a boast.””I’m quite a man.

…we have seen that the priests regard the state as an enemy to be exploited, it is only natural that our politicians do likewise. Thus, although patriotism is held in greater esteem in this country...

Food shouldn’t be that shade of green, lass.” – Faolán MacIntyre

My dear boy, in Ireland the midwife uses one hand to hold the baby’s best fighting arm from the font water, and grips its jaws with the other lest the goes to litigation about it....