Northern Irish Quotes

. . . I still hold two truths with equal and fundamental certainty. One: the British did terrible things to the Irish. Two: the Irish, had they the power, would have done equally terrible things to the British. And so also for any other paired adversaries I can imagine. The difficulty is to hold on to both truths with equal intensity, not let either one negate the other, and know when to emphasize one without forgetting the other. Our humanity is probably lost and gained in the necessary tension between them both. I hope, by the way, that I do not sound anti-British. It is impossible not to admire a people who gave up India and held on to Northern Ireland. That shows a truly Celtic sense of humor.

The exuberant exaggerations of the Irish sagas are not for the northern gods; Freyja, Thor, Loki have the robust common sense which the Vikings themselves admired hugely,

The Northern army was most often run like a business, solving a problem. The Southern army was run like a family, confronting a human crisis.

Look at every territorial dispute you care to mention. Northern Ireland, for instance.” “Religion in that case,” Jamie ventured. “Not just. Religion was the badge of identity, but it wasn’t really about whether you went to Mass or to a tub-thumping Protestant chapel. It was a result of the movement of people. The Protestant planters—many of them Scots—replaced the native Irish, remember? Movement of people again.

Pagan paths, of which there are many, more often than not, are based upon an acknowledgement of a Divine presence within nature, as acknowledged by the pre-Christian peoples of these Islands and Northern Europe more than 1500 years ago.

Much of the Irish landscape is dominated by peat bogs; the anaerobic and acidic conditions in the densely packed earth mean that the past in Ireland can be subject to macabre resurrection. Peat cutters occasionally churn up ancient mandibles, clavicles, or entire cadavers that have been preserved for millennia. The bodies date as far back as the Bronze Age, and often show signs of ritual sacrifice and violent death. These victims, cast out of their communities and buried, have surfaced vividly intact, from their hair to their leathery skin. The poet Seamus Heaney, who harvested peat as a boy on his family’s farm, once described the bogs of Ireland as “a landscape that remembered everything that had happened in and to it.

For all of our enormous geographic range, for all of our sectionalism, for all of our interwoven breeds drawn from every part of the ethnic world, we are a nation, a new breed. Americans are much more American than they are Northerners, Southerners, Westerners, or Easterners. And descendants of English, Irish, Italian, Jewish, German, Polish are essentially American. This is not patriotic whoop-de-do; it is carefully observed fact. California Chinese, Boston Irish, Wisconsin German, yes, and Alabama Negroes, have more in common than they have apart. And this is the more remarkable because it has happened so quickly. It is a fact that Americans from all sections and of all racial extractions are more alike than the Welsh are like the English, the Lancashireman like the Cockney, or for that matter the Lowland Scot like the Highlander. It is astonishing that this has happened in less than two hundred years and most of it in the last fifty. The American identity is an exact and provable thing.

Congress, in the twenties, put an end to the dangerous, turbulent flood of immigrants (14 million between 1900 and 1920) by passing laws setting immigration quotas: the quotas favored Anglo-Saxons, kept out black and yellow people, limited severely the coming of Latins, Slavs, Jews. No African country could send more than 100 people; 100 was the limit for China, for Bulgaria, for Palestine; 34,007 could come from England or Northern Ireland, but only 3,845 from Italy; 51,227 from Germany, but only 124 from Lithuania; 28,567 from the Irish Free State, but only 2,248 from Russia.

While a mere one million people had arrived in America in the seventy years between independence and 1840, over the following sixty years no fewer than thirty million came flooding in—most of them northern Europeans, particularly Britons and Irish, in the years of the first great wave that lasted until 1890;

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.

partial exception to this pattern was the Catholic Church, which generally did not require black worshippers to sit in separate pews (although its parochial schools were segregated). Some freedmen abandoned Catholicism for black-controlled Protestant denominations, but others were attracted to it precisely because, a Northern teacher reported from Natchez, “they are treated on terms of equality, at least while they are in church.” And Catholicism retained its hold on large numbers of New Orleans free blacks who, at least on Sunday, coexisted harmoniously with the city’s French and Irish white Catholic population.

Their bloodline was stained by centuries of continuous warfare along the border between England and Scotland, and then in the bitter settlements of England’s Ulster Plantation in Northern Ireland.

The positive effects of war on mental health were first noticed by the great sociologist Emile Durkheim, who found that when European countries went to war, suicide rates dropped. Psychiatric wards in Paris were strangely empty during both world wars, and that remained true even as the German army rolled into the city in 1940. Researchers documented a similar phenomenon during civil wars in Spain, Algeria, Lebanon, and Northern Ireland. An Irish psychologist named H. A. Lyons found that suicide rates in Belfast dropped 50 percent during the riots of 1969 and 1970, and homicide and other violent crimes also went down. Depression rates for both men and women declined abruptly during that period, with men experiencing the most extreme drop in the most violent districts. County Derry, on the other hand—which suffered almost no violence at all—saw male depression rates rise rather than fall. Lyons hypothesized that men in the peaceful areas were depressed because they couldn’t help their society by participating in the struggle. “When people are actively engaged in a cause their lives have more purpose… with a resulting improvement in mental health,” Lyons wrote in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research in 1979. “It would be irresponsible to suggest violence as a means of improving mental health, but the Belfast findings suggest that people will feel better psychologically if they have more involvement with their community.

Pitt arrived at the Broad Street Station of the Great Northern Railway just in time to catch his train to Lincolnshire. He slammed the carriage door as the engine started to belch forth steam and the fireman stoked the furnace, and with a roar and a clash of iron they moved out of the vast, grimy dome into the sunlight and began the long journey past the factories and houses and through the suburbs of the largest, wealthiest, and most populous city in the world. Within its bounds lived more Scots than in Edinburgh, more Irish than in Dublin, and more Roman Catholics than in Rome.

While Dixieland men may have struggled with a language inferiority complex, the opposite is true of Southern women. We’ve always known our accent is an asset, a special trait that makes us stand out from our Northern peers in all the best ways. For one thing, men can’t resist it. Our slow, musical speech drips with charm, and with the implied delights of a long, slow afternoon sipping home-brewed tea on the back porch. In educated circles, Southern speech is considered aristocratic, and for good reason: it is far closer linguistically to the Queen’s English than any other American accent. Scottish, Irish, and rural English formed the basis of our language years ago, and the accent has held strong ever since. In the poor hill country there haven’t been many other linguistic influences, and in Charleston you’d be hard pressed to tell a British tourist from a native. In the Delta of Mississippi and Louisiana, the mixture of French, West Indian, and Southern formed two dialects--Cajun and Creole--that in some places are far more like French than English.

Americans are much more American than they are Northerners, Southerners, Westerners, or Easterners. And descendants of English, Irish, Italian, Jewish, German, Polish are essentially American

ERIC: She looked like Gerry Adams without the beard. BRIDGET: Ok... ERIC: It is of course hard to imagine Gerry Adams without the beard. The Gerry Adams beard is part and parcel of the Gerry Adams persona. It symbolises his revolutionary ardour, his passion for constitutional change. And now as it whitens it cements his status as eminence grise, aging philosopher-king. But without the beard he'd look like she did to me that cold autumnal morning on Cyprus Avenue. Innocent. Irrelevant. Lost.

The United States could not win the war if blacks continued as sharecroppers down South. The South was not an important area either politically or economically as far as the internationalists were concerned. (“The white South,” Myrdal wrote, “is itself a minority and a national problem.”) It was important only as a source of much-needed labor, at a time when most white southerners concurred because they no longer needed them to chop or harvest cotton and considered migration a simple solution to their biggest social problem. The foundations which did the thinking for the internationalist ruling class quickly realized that that flow of labor into the factories of the industrial North was impeded less by the system of political segregation in the South than by what they would eventually term the de-facto housing segregation in the North, which meant, in effect, the existence of residential patterns based on ethnic neighborhoods. The logistics problem facing Louis Wirth and his colleagues in the psychological-warfare establishment was not so much how to move the black up from the South — the wage differential and the railroads would accomplish that — but rather where to put him when he got there. Northern cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia were essentially an assemblage of neighborhoods arranged as ethnic fiefdoms, dominated at that time by the most recent arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe as well as the Irish and Germans. As Wirth makes clear in his sociological writings, any group that has this kind of cohesiveness and population density had political power, and the question in his mind was precisely whether this political power was going to be used in the interests of the WASP ruling elite, who needed these people to fight a war that had nothing approaching majority support among ethnics of the sort Wirth viewed with suspicion. This group of “ethnic” Americans posed a problem for the psychological-warfare establishment because it posed a problem to the ethnic group that made up that establishment. This group of people constituted a Gestalt - ethnic, Catholic, unionized, and urban - whose mutual and reinforcing affiliations effectively removed them from the influence of instruments of mass communication which the psychological-warfare establishment saw as critical in controlling them. If one added the demographic increase this group enjoyed — as Catholics they were forbidden to use contraceptives — it is easy enough to see that their increase in political power posed a threat to WASP hegemony over the culture at precisely the moment when the WASP elite was engaged in a life-and-death struggle with fascism. It was Wirth’s job to bring them under control, lest they jeopardize the war effort.

Although Lewis worked in England, his heart was firmly fixed in the northern counties of Ireland, especially County Down. As he once remarked to his Irish student David Bleakley, “Heaven is Oxford lifted and placed in the middle of County Down.

What you don’t get is I’m not even Irish– not proper Irish. I just want tae be. But all I am to the Free Staters is a dirty Northerner. I’m as pathetic as the Prods trying to be British when your lot think they’re just a pack of Paddies. You don’t want them. Them down south don’t want us. Everyone just wants us to crawl away and die some place dark where they don’t have to listen to us squealing for attention.

Ireland, as reported by Giraldus, had a chapel of the Colidei on an island of Tipperary, as he declared some were on islands of Wales. They were in Armagh in 920. Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, asserts that the Northern Irish, "continued still their old tradition," in spite of the declaration of Pope Honorius.

By formal declaration the Northern American states had abolished slavery; but the shovel gangs of the Irish and Chinese immigrants who built the railroads were, during their working span, hardly to be distinguished from slaves, if only temporary slaves. Republican government had promoted civil justice, along with law and order, to such an extent that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts showed such a low rate of violence or crime that Daniel Webster could boast without exaggeration that no one had to lock the door of his house at night. But these democratic communities were nevertheless part of a National State that waged merciless war all through the nineteenth century upon the rightful original occupants of the soil, the American Indians; that still shamelessly robs and mistreats their descendants; and that had despoiled Mexico of millions of acres of land in an infamous war.

both tariff rates and domestic charges for the use of railroad freight blatantly discriminated against the South, impeding its ability to grow and compete. The rates charged for shipping goods along the nation’s railways had for decades been rigged to protect Northern markets from Southern goods.

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

from the great heart and centre of the Irish kingdom, five great arteries or roads radiated from Tara to the various parts of the country — the Slighe Cualann, which ran toward the present County Wicklow; the Slighe Mor, the great Western road, which ran via Dublin to Galway; the Slighe Asail which ran near the present Mullingar; the Slighe Dala which ran Southwest; and the Slighe Midluachra, the Northern road. Great, noble and beautiful truly was our Tara of the Kings.[17]

Of the Milesians, Eber and Eremon divided the land between them — Eremon getting the Northern half of the Island, and Eber the Southern. The Northeastern corner was accorded to the children of their lost brother, Ir, and the Southwestern corner to their cousin Lughaid, the son of Ith. An oft-told story says that when Eber and Eremon had divided their followers, each taking an equal number of soldiers and an equal number of the men of every craft, there remained a harper and a poet. Drawing lots for these, the harper fell to Eremon and the poet to Eber — which explains why, ever since, the North of Ireland has been celebrated for music, and the South for song.

Paul Costelloe One of the most established and experienced names in British fashion, Irish-born Paul Costelloe has maintained a highly successful design label for more than twenty-five years. He was educated in Paris and Milan, and has since become known for his expertise in fabrics, primarily crisp linen and tweed. I was commuting to London from Ireland at the time when I got a call to come to Kensington Palace. I got a minicab and threw some garments in the back of the car, and the driver drove me to Kensington Palace. The police at the gate were surprised to see a battered minicab--it was no black cab, if you know the difference between a black cab and a minicab in London (a minicab is half the price of a black cab and always more battered). Anyway, they asked me who I was. I said, “I have an appointment to see Diana,” and they told me to wait. They were reluctant to let me through the gates--it was during the major troubles in Northern Ireland, during the mid to late seventies and early eighties, when Belfast was blazing--but I was soon met at the door. I remember hauling my garments up the stairs of the palace. I fell. Diana came halfway down the stairs and gave me a hand with the garments. Then we went into the living room and had a lovely cup of tea, and I met the children, William and Harry. She tried on some of the garments right there in front of me. I (being a confirmed heterosexual) found her very attraction. I came back down the stairs, and half an hour later she made her selection. She was a perfect size 10 (that would be a U.S. size 8), except she was tall, so a few things had to be lengthened. She was an absolute delight. Afterward, I went into Hyde Park for the afternoon and sat on a bench. I just couldn’t believe what had just happened!

But in the beginning of the fourth century, Ulster’s power was irrevocably broken, and by far the greater portion of her territory wrested from her — her people driven into miserably narrow bounds from which, ever after, they can hardly be said to have emerged. It was when Muiredeach Tireach, grandson of Carbri of the Liffey, was High-King of Ireland, that Ulster was despoiled and broken by his nephews, the three Collas, who, on the ruins of the old kingdom of Uladh, founded a new kingdom — of Oirgialla (Oriel) — which was henceforth for nearly a thousand years to play an important part in the history of Northern Ireland. Muiredeach’s

I am a nomad, son of an ancient line of nomads. The larger part of my family line is made up of the Scots-Irish, a people descended from that peculiar mixture of the Celts of the northern British Isles and the invading Danes and Norsemen. The result was a landless, illiterate, anarchic, and warlike people who were always difficult, if not downright impossible, to govern. They were a race the British Crown rightfully viewed as dangerous rebels,

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

The question remained, as it had throughout Danny’s life, as to what exactly the good was. It had something to do with loyalty and something to do with the primacy of a man’s honor. It was tied up in duty, and it assumed a tacit understanding of all the things about it that need never be spoken aloud. It was, purely of necessity, conciliatory to the Brahmins on the outside while remaining firmly anti-Protestant on the inside. It was anticolored, for it was taken as a given that the Irish, for all their struggles and all those still to come, were Northern European and undeniably white, white as last night’s moon, and the idea had never been to seat every race at the table, just to make sure that the last chair would be saved for a Hibernian before the doors to the room were pulled shut. It was above all, as far as Danny understood it, committed to the idea that those who exemplified the good in public were allowed certain exemptions as to how they behaved in private.

If I were to prepare one immaculately inspected generality it would be this: For all of our enormous geographic range, for all of our sectionalism, for all of our interwoven breeds drawn from every part of the ethnic world, we are a nation, a new breed. Americans are much more American than they are Northerners, Southerners, Westerners, or Easterners. And descendants of English, Irish, Italian, Jewish, German, Polish are essentially American. This is not patriotic whoop-de-do; it is carefully observed fact. California Chinese, Boston Irish, Wisconsin German, yes, and Alabama Negroes, have more in common than they have apart. And this is the more remarkable because it happened so quickly.

Indisputably, Margaret Thatcher had a jaundiced view of the Irish. Perhaps Peter Mandelson’s vignette about meeting her soon after he was appointed Northern Ireland Secretary in 1999 sheds some light: She came up to me and she said, ‘I’ve got one thing to say to you, my boy.’ She said, ‘You can’t trust the Irish, they’re all liars. Liars, and that’s what you have to remember, so just don’t forget it.’ With that she waltzed off and that was my only personal exposure to her.

They are a strange northern people who came to this mountain peninsula an ice age ago and have kept their bloodlines intact through a thousand invasions. Their language is unrelated to Chinese or Japanese, closer, in fact, to Finnish and Hungarian. They don’t like anyone who isn’t Korean, and they don’t like each other all that much, either. They’re hardheaded, hard-drinking, tough little bastards, “the Irish of Asia.

In my adult years, fighting hearing-impaired loss, I went to an audiologist who, it turns out, was Irish Catholic. On his graph, when he identified a loss so severe that it looked like a stock market crash—and knowing my northern roots—he asked if I had ever been in a mining accident. A dramatic hearing drop, trouble with high-pitch p, f, t, s consonants starting so many words, suggested that an accident had damaged my hearing. “No, a loud Catholic family,” was my best guess. The audiologist laughed. He had a club membership.

GERRY: [towards his newborn granddaughter] Y'don't even know your own name. And a bet you've no idea who I am? Y'don't know anything, do ya? You're startin' with a completely new sheet, eh? You're one big blank page, that's what you are. But you're the next page, our kid... you're the next page. GERRY smiles at his grandchild as the lights fade to Blackout.

Once the way to America had been shown by the pioneers of 1717-18, going to America became easier for later emigrants. At times the zeal for migration became almost a mania, in the unaccountable manner of fads. the movement resembled an undulant fever, reaching its climax in those years when economic conditions pressed hardest in Ulster. There were five great waves of emigration, with a lesser flow in intervening years. An analysis of the tides of 1717-18, 1725-29, 1740-41, 1754-55, and 1771-75 provides, in effect, a chart of the economic health of northern Ireland.

In other words, there shall be no discrimination on account of color. If all whites vote, then must all blacks….It is sometimes said “What! Let the freedman, yesterday a slave, vote?” I am inclined to think that there is more harm in refusing than in conceding the franchise. It is said that they are as intelligent as the Irish just arrived; but the question has become immensely practical in this respect: Without their votes we cannot establish stable governments in the Rebel States. Their votes are as necessary as their muskets; of this I am satisfied. Without them, the old enemy will reappear, and under the forms of law take possession of the governments, choose magistrates and officers, and in alliance with the Northern Democracy, put us all in peril again,

After the Irish War of Independence led to the partition of Ireland, in 1921, the island was split in two: in the South, twenty-six counties achieved a measure of independence as the Irish Free State, while in the North, a remaining six counties continued to be ruled by Great Britain. Like other staunch republicans, the Price family did not refer to the place where they happened to reside as “Northern Ireland.” Instead it was “the North of Ireland.” In the fraught local vernacular, even proper nouns could be political.

the most notorious incident as far as the British were concerned was the August 1979 assassination of Lord Mountbatten,

The Union army's southward march-especially in the Mississippi Valley-stretched supply lines, brought thousands of defenseless ex-slaves under Union protection, and exposed large expanses of occupied territory to Confederate raiders, further multiplying the army's demand for soldiers. On the home front, these new demands sparked violent opposition to federal manpower policies. The Enrollment Act of March 1863 allowed wealthy conscripts to buy their way out of military service by either paying a $300 commutation fee or employing a substitute. Others received hardship exemptions as specified in the act, though political influence rather than genuine need too often determined an applicant's success. Those without money or political influence found the draft especially burdensome. In July, hundreds of New Yorkers, many of the Irish immigrants, angered by the inequities of the draft, lashed out at the most visible and vulnerable symbols of the war: their black neighbors. The riot raised serious questions about the enrollment system and sent Northern politicians scurrying for an alternative to conscription. To even the most politically naive Northerners, the enlistment of black men provided a means to defuse draft resistance at a time when the federal army's need for soldiers was increasing. At the same time, well-publicized battle achievements by black regiments at Port Hudson and Milliken's Bend, Louisiana, and at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, eased popular fears that black men could not fight, mitigated white opposition within army ranks, and stoked the enthusiasm of both recruiters and black volunteers.

They were “Scotch-Irish”—that is, from the lowlands of Scotland, the northern counties of England, and Ulster in Northern Ireland. The borderlands—as this region was known—were remote and lawless territories that had been fought over for hundreds of years. The people of the region were steeped in violence.

Widukind narrated with spirit and vigor the story of his own Saxon people. Liutprand the Lombard tells of his trips to Constantinople and has a good grasp of the general state of Europe in the middle of the tenth century. Thietmar records the story of the German kings and of his Bishopric of Merseburg to 1018. Raoul Glaber, writing about the middle of the eleventh century, entertains us hugely by his pot-pourri of portents and disasters, marvels and mysteries of the preceding sixty years, and, ere he closes, confides an account of his early sinful life and subsequent monastic adventures. Hermann the Lame, of Reichenau, who died in 1054, and Marianus Scotus (1026-1083), an Irish monk who wandered to Germany, wrote world histories, and they are noted for their chronological researches. With these men and with Adam of Bremen, who introduces us to the history and geography of northern Europe, and Lambert of Hersfeld, who gives a detailed and well-written, though partisan, account of the eventful years 1073-1077, we find the writing of history well developed before the time of the First Crusade.

The slaveholders had a special interest in maintaining the degradation of the free Negro. If the fugitive slave was the "Safety Valve of Slavery," the subduing of the free black population of the North was what kept the safety valve from turning into a massive tear which would allow all the power to escape from the chamber. The slaveholders were aware that the harsh conditions faced by free Negroes in the North helped keep their laborers down on the farm; hence they did their best to publicize the cold reception that awaited any slave so foolish as to run away from the security of the plantation. They did more than observe events in the North: because they had a strong interest in maintaining the free Negro there in a condition as much like slavery as possible, they sought an alliance with Northern white labor based on the defense of color caste.

Conn, with his allies, the Degades, was defeated in ten battles — till at length, for peace sake, he had to grant to Mogh one-half of Ireland — the southern half, henceforth to be known as Leth Mogha, Mogh’s half — dominion over which was claimed by Mogh’s successors, through almost ten centuries following. The northern half, which he retained under his own rule is since known as Leth Cuinn, Conn’s half.

I had no idea what “mira” meant. But the boy was holding a baseball bat in a distinctly threatening manner, and I understood immediately what was happening to us. We were being robbed. Damned if I can remember my friend’s name, but we were two white kids in the park. The other boys were Puerto Rican. Our patch of the city was still teeming with thousands of white ethnic families like the Kellys—Irish, Jews, Italians, assorted eastern and northern Europeans, all living on top of each other. But the neighborhood was just getting its first wave of Puerto Ricans. Even an eight-year-old could sense fresh tension on the sidewalks and in the parks. No one flashed a knife or a gun that day. The baseball bat was more than enough to grab my attention. One of the older boys reached his hands around my neck and started squeezing. I could feel other hands reaching into my pockets. I had no money. No one had cell phones or other electronic devices back then. As I gasped for oxygen and my eyes began to bulge, I stole a glance at my friend, who looked just as terrified as I was. The boys were rifling through his pockets too. The next thing I heard was someone saying “zapatos.” A couple of boys shoved us down on the path, while others yanked at our shoes. Barely pausing to untie the laces, they pulled the shoes right from our feet, then ran off into the park. Neither of us was hurt in the robbery, except for our sense of security and our city-kid pride. But it was a genuinely rattling experience, one that stuck with me and made me empathetic to crime victims for the rest of my life: New York’s future police commissioner and his third-grade classmate walking forlornly home across West Ninety-First Street with nothing but dirty white socks on their feet.

Viewed through this prism, the War of Northern Aggression had little to do with slavery. Rather, it was a culture war in which Yankees imposed their imperialist and capitalistic will on the agrarian South, just as the English had done to the Irish and Scots—and as America did to the Indians and the Mexicans in the name of Manifest Destiny.