Ira Ireland Quotes

Who should be held accountable for a shared history of violence? It was a question that was dogging Northern Ireland as a whole.

The bomb exploded, killing five people, but not Thatcher. The IRA issued a statement, eloquently capturing the strategic advantage of terrorism: ‘Today we were unlucky, but remember, we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.

The body is a fantastic machine,’ Hughes told Mackers in one of his Boston College interviews, recounting the grueling sequence of a hunger strike. ‘It’ll eat off all the fat tissue first, then it starts eating away at the muscle, to keep your brain alive.’ Long after Hughes and Price called an end to their strikes and attempted to reintegrate into society, the nursed old grudges and endlessly replayed their worst wartime abominations. In a sense, they never stopped devouring themselves.

Indeed, it could occasionally seem that support for the armed struggle was more fervent in Boston or Chicago than it was in Belfast or Derry. The romantic idyll of a revolutionary movement is easier to sustain when there is no danger that one's own family members might get blown to pieces on a trip to the grocery store. Some people in Ireland looked askance at the "plastic Paddies" who urged bloody war in Ulster from the safe distance of America.

Once, in the summer of 1995, Adams gave a speech at a rally in Belfast. He looked like a politician, in a crisp summer suit, consulting his cue cards. But during a pause in his prepared remarks, someone in the crowd shouted, "Bring back the IRA!" As the audience cheered, Adams chuckled and smiled. Then he leaned into the microphone and said, "They haven't gone away, you know.

But even if your parents were ardent supporters of the IRA, there were reasons not to tell them that you had joined. If the police or the army broke down the door to interrogate them, the less they knew, the better.

The 'Irish Question' has dogged English politics for four hundred years and will continue to measure out its irresolution in blood and human lives until there is peace in Ireland.

He must have known, or at least suspected, that she was herself a member of the IRA, but they would argue, amiably, about politics as if they were a couple of graduate students, rather than adversaries in a bloody guerrilla war. At one point, Corden-Lloyd told her that he would love to come back and see her in ten years' time, 'and we could all tell each other the whole truth.

My poor scapegoat, I almost love you but would have cast, I know, the stones of silence. I am the artful voyeur of your brain's exposed and darkened combs, your muscles' webbing and all your numbered bones: I who have stood dumb when your betraying sisters, cauled in tar, wept by the railings, who would connive in civilized outrage yet understand the exact and tribal, intimate revenge. -"Punishment

The atomic bomb brings the men home from every quarter of the earth because the war is not so much over as stunned back into history...

When Haughey emphasised that ‘a very keen sense of injustice [was] rampant in Ireland’, Mrs Thatcher asked for how long these emotions had lasted. The Taoiseach said, ‘700 years in our country.

One night, someone smeared the house of one of his neighbors with excrement—wrong address, apparently—a gesture whose combination of vindictiveness and clumsiness had all the hallmarks of the IRA.

His job, he felt, was to speak for the victims - to represent the next person who might be killed in the conflict. He had no particular party; his only allegiance was to those who had been (and would be) cut down.

the Irish War of Independence, which ended with the treaty signed between the British government and Michael Collins’s I.R.A. in 1922. Under the treaty Ireland was partitioned, with twenty-six southern counties becoming a Free State, and the six northern counties remaining under British sovereignty. The result was civil war.

Indeed, it could occasionally seem that support for the armed struggle was more fervent in Boston or Chicago than it was in Belfast or Derry. The romantic idyll of a revolutionary movement is easier to sustain when there is no danger that one's own family members might get blown to pieces on a trip to the grocery store.. Some people in Ireland looked askance at the "plastic Paddies" who urged bloody war in Ulster from the safe distance of America.

Scappaticci would also be a dangerous man to prosecute, knowing what he knew about the extent to which the butchery of the Nutting Squad had been countenanced, or facilitated, by Her Majesty's Government. It would be exceedingly risky for the state to put Stakeknife into any position where he might feel the need to start talking. When it came to his former comrades in the IRA, Scappaticci may have enjoyed similar immunity. He knew too much about too many people.

now I want something better than vengeance, and something almost as hard to get.” He told it to the young woman in the second row: “I want remembrance.” He told it to all of them: “Remembrance. It’s hard to get because life goes on; every year we have new horrors—a Vietnam, terrorist activities in the Middle East and Ireland, assassinations”—(ninety-four sixty-five-year-old men?)—“and every year,” he drove himself on, “the horror of horrors, the Holocaust, becomes farther away, a little less horrible. But philosophers have warned us: if we forget the past, we are doomed to repeat it.

This painting was owned by Sir Alfred Beit, the former British M.P. who died in 1994. It was housed at Russborough House in Ireland, from where it was stolen twice. It was first taken on 26 April 1974, when it was among 18 pictures stolen by a gang connected to the IRA. Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid was recovered eight days later, with very little damage to the work. On 21 May 1986 the painting was stolen a second time and recovered in Antwerp seven years later. Sir Alfred presented a number of paintings to the National Gallery of Ireland in 1987, including this painting, which forms part of the Irish national collection.

The time, as it seemed to me, did come, and we went into the fight. I am glad we did. We seem to have lost. We have not lost. To refuse to fight would have been to lose; to fight is to win. We have kept faith with the past, and handed on a tradition to the future....I assume that I am speaking to Englishmen, who value their freedom and who profess to be fighting for the freedom of Belgium and Serbia. Believe that we, too, love freedom and desire it. To us it is more desirable than anything in the world. If you strike us down now, we shall rise again and renew the fight. You cannot conquer Ireland. You cannot extinguish the Irish passion for freedom. If our deed has not been sufficient to win freedom, then our children will win it by a better deed.

In the early '80s, I spent a year working on a verse-play -- based on the life of Anne Maguire (whose sister, Mairead, founded the Peace People movement after Anne took her own life). Anne's three children were killed on the pavement as she was wheeling the pram one day in 1976 by an IRA fugitive's getaway car -- the driver fatally shot by a British soldier; this singular incident crystallized for me so much of the terror then in the air. Writing was a way of keeping clear -- in the sense of fixing it, restoring it facet by facet, to clarity. Catching a moment of history like a fly in amber with the chorus of witnesses alive, outside. After all, poetry affords this license and extreme economy. I have no business, of course, to write about such matters, being a complete foreigner in Ireland. But you do it because it is nobody's business. What you write is nobody's business. Isn't that poetry? - "What You Write Is Nobody's Business": An Interview With Wong May (The Believer, May 2014)

Sometimes it felt as if they spent more nights on the floor than in their beds. Lying awake, staring at the ceiling, Michael would listen to the sounds of bullets ricocheting off the concrete outside. It was a mad life. But as the anarchy persisted from one month to the next, it became the only life he knew.

Caitlin Macguire was one of the best snipers he’d ever encountered. A veteran of the Ulster Volunteer Force in Northern Ireland, she’d been responsible for assassinating half a dozen IRA members before she’d turned thirty, plus one of her own men suspected of turning traitor. The Troubles might have simmered down since then, but Faulkner had found use for her. Time and again she had proven herself a ruthless and efficient killer, and she was sitting on a rooftop with a silenced sniper rifle barely two hundred yards away. ‘If I had, do you not think I’d take it?’ It took a brave man indeed to interrupt her during her work. ‘Little bastard’s dug in tight, so he is

During my years inside the IRA, a number of senior provo intelligence officers confirmed to me that, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, McGuinness had been Head of the IRA Northern Command, one of the most senior positions throughout the entire IRA organisation. More disgracefully and, I would suggest, more sickening, was the fact that McGuinness was widely known in the ‘Derry area of Northern Ireland to have been responsible for the loss of several people’s lives, as well as being the authority behind many savage punishment beatings. Over

One example of how closely the two work together was revealed during the British Parliamentary or local Northern Ireland elections.  During the years, I would become involved in helping the Sinn Fein cause, along with many other young men and women, many of whom were members of the IRA. From their headquarters in Connolly House, Belfast, Sinn Fein organisers would try, with the assistance of the IRA, to do everything in their power to rig the elections.  The plan would be to distribute false identification papers to IRA men and women and other republican sympathisers, and send them around to a number of polling stations so that they could cast votes in perhaps six to ten different places. The

He also told me that I had no option but to forget all my relatives and friends in Northern Ireland, and that I had to realise that because of the IRA’s international contacts, I would have to accept that my life would always be at risk.  He told me that once I had left the Province I would be on my own, and they would not be able to guarantee my life, nor the lives of Angie and the boys if they should join me.

End of May 2012 The continuation of my email to Andy: …I was delighted to return to London after war-ravaged Belfast. The students in our college had to evacuate several times due to IRA bomb threats. I must have subconsciously selected to be in Northern Ireland because of my unsettling inner upheavals. Much like the riots that went on in the city in 1971, I was unconsciously fighting my inner demons within myself. I needed that year to overcome my sexual additions and to immerse myself in my fashion studies. By the following year, I had compiled an impressive fashion design portfolio for application with various London Art and Design colleges. Foundation students generally required two years to complete their studies. I graduated from the Belfast College of Art with flying colors within a year. By the autumn of 1972, I was accepted into the prestigious Harrow School of Art and Technology. Around that period, my father’s business was waning and my family had financial difficulty sponsoring my graduate studies. Unbeknownst to my family, I had earned sufficient money during my Harem services to comfortably put myself through college. I lied to my parents and told them I was working part-time in London to make ends meet so I could finance my fashion education. They believed my tall tale. For the next three years I put my heart and soul into my fashion projects. I would occasionally work as a waiter at the famous Rainbow Room in Biba, which is now defunct. Working at this dinner dance club was a convenient way of meeting beautiful and trendy patrons, who often visit this capricious establishment.

One person's Utopia usually means another person's hell. We live in a state of uncertainty, not just in Northern Ireland, but by virtue of being human.

It was here that Lieutenant Thomas Kettle fell, leading a company of the 9th Royal Dublin Fusiliers just ahead of Lieutenant Emmet Dalton – who won a Military Cross in the engagement, acquired the nickname ‘Ginchy’, later became IRA Director of Munitions, and was to reach the rank of general in the army of independent Ireland. Kettle was a former Irish nationalist MP and Professor of National Economics at University College Dublin, who had been in Belgium at the beginning of the war buying guns for the nationalist Irish Volunteers. He joined up believing that the war had a just cause, being fought on behalf of small nations such as Belgium, Serbia and Ireland too. But he had been dispirited by the Easter Rising in Dublin. While he had no sympathy with the rebels, he correctly predicted how posterity might view him vis-à-vis the 1916 leaders. ‘These men,’ he wrote, ‘will go down in history as heroes and martyrs, and I will go down – if I go down at all – as a bloody British officer.

I agree eventually there has to be negotiations but I believe negotiations need to be fair and just, and a guarantee that they will not move onto another generation. Sinn Fein and the IRA have not done that. They sentenced young people, young Republicans and young working-class people to another generation of fighting.

I’ll James you, you foxy-faced drippings of a cankered __, you poxy bastarding whore’s melt, I put it to myself, and thought it worth it to hit him a belt; but, when all is said and done, I was but sixteen and he was a grown man and had come through Borstal institutions, mostly, I would say, by sucking up to bullying big bollixes the likes of Dale, not by letting his backstraps down—he was too ugly for that, but maybe some of these bastards would get a bit of a drop. I was no country Paddy from the middle of the Bog of Allen to be frightened to death by a lot of Liverpool seldom-fed bastards, nor was I one of your wrap-the-green-flag-round-me junior Civil Servants that came into the IRA from the Gaelic League, and well ready to die for their country any day of the week, purity in their hearts, truth on their lips, for the glory of God and the honour of Ireland. No, be Jesus, I was from Russell Street, North Circular Road, Dublin, from the Northside where, be Jesus, the likes of Dale wouldn’t make a dinner for them, where the whole of this pack of Limeys would be scruff-hounds would be et, bet, and threw up again __et without salt. I’ll James you, you bastard. Then the smile had to fade and the joke was rejected and the gentleness refused, never a better nor my own sweet self, and it wasn’t off the stones I licked. The old fellow would beat the best of them round our way and him only my height now, though fully grown a hell of a long time. James, be Jesus, prepare to meet thy Jesus. And I just stood up, held up a bag and said, ‘Finished work,’ and the screw nodded, though I hadn’t said ‘sir’ because I hadn’t time.

The IRA issued a statement, eloquently capturing the strategic advantage of terrorism: “Today we were unlucky, but remember, we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.

Meanwhile, the reality on the ground in the North was that the British Army was the IRA's best recruiting agent. The saturation was such that at one stage there were 2,000 soldiers billeted in Paddy Devlin's Belfast constituency alone, one to every ten voters. On a specimen Saturday night Devlin counted thirty army vehicles in the district. Soldiers moved along in groups of twenty or more, dispersed on both sides of the streets, guns at the ready. There were no police to be seen.