Irish Politician Quotes

Edmund Burke

Éamon de Valera

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Michael Collins

James Connolly

Mary Robinson

Douglas Hyde

I left school at age 13. I was illiterate with no role models. The great psychobabble today is the dysfunctional family. Well, I've never met one that was functional. In Limerick, a family that was dysfunctional was one who could afford to drink but didn't.
I had the taste of the alcohol since I was 11 … It allowed me to be clever, charming and to behave outrageously. Acting also allowed me not to be me. So I could indulge every fantasy in this paradise of America.

Malachy McCourt

Peace is not the absence of war. Lasting peace is rooted in justice. It is rooted in a democratic culture which cherishes the rule of law and scorns the summary justice, social terrorism and gangsterism which are a fact of life for too many people in Northern Ireland.

Whether it's in relation to the sort of music that is played there or not, in any event, it's tragic for the families involved here.

The fate of you, the aristocracy of industry, will be as the fate of the aristocracy of land if you do not show that you have some humanity still among you.

Every TD, from the youngest or newest in the House, dreams of being Taoiseach.

Charles Haughey

If there is to be a war between England and the United States, tis impossible for us to pretend sympathy with the former. We shall have allies, not enemies, on the banks of the Columbia, and distant and desolate as are those tracts beyond the Rocky Mountains, even there may arise an opportunity for demanding and regaining our place among the nations.

In a physical contest on the field of battle it is allowable to use tactics and strategy, to retreat as well as advance, to have recourse to a ruse as well as open attack; but in matters of principle there can be no tactics, there is one straight forward course to follow and that course must be found and followed without swerving to the end.

Terence MacSwiney

The dread of death seems implanted in the nature of human kind as a peculiar curse, since no other species of created beings are capable of it.

Richard Annesley, 6th Earl of Anglesey

I don't know how people who engage in that don't commit suicide

I wish it then to be clearly understood that under present conditions I am definitely opposed to any proposal that may come forward involving insurrection.

The sacred cannot be precisely defined. Each of us perceives it through the lens of a unique personal history. For me, sacredness is an experience of the inner radiance of life, the unseen force that transforms and nourishes the physical world but is never limited by it. There is something more to it, a mystery that is never totally grasped.

People cannot escape from the obligation of a statute by putting a private interpretation upon its language.

Edward Macnaghten, Baron Macnaghten

Oppression makes wise men mad; but the distemper is still the madness of the wise, which is better than the sobriety of fools.

There is an utter ignorance of, and indifference to, our sufferings and privations…. What care they for us, provided we be submissive, pay the taxes, furnish recruits for the Army and Navy and bless the masters who either despise or oppress or combine both? The apathy that exists respecting Ireland is worse than the national antipathy they bear us.

Daniel O'Connell

The thing he proposes to buy is what cannot be sold—liberty.

I am against this Treaty not because I am a man of war but because I am a man of peace. I am against this Treaty because it will not end the centuries of conflict between the two nations of Great Britain and Ireland.

Éamon de Valera

It's not that women get written out of history - they never get written in.

Bernadette Devlin McAliskey

To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God.

In the spring of 1914, when asked if anything could now prevent Home Rule:

A European war might do it.

None of us, whether we are in America or Ireland, or wherever we may be, will be satisfied until we have destroyed the last link which keeps Ireland bound to England.

Charles Stewart Parnell

What I have signed I will stand by, in the belief that the end of the conflict of centuries is at hand.

Arthur Griffith

To this day, good English usually means the English wealthy and powerful people spoke a generation or two ago.

We hear from good authority that the King was much pleased with Castle Rackrent—he rubbed his hands and said what—what—I know something now of my Irish subjects.

Richard Lovell Edgeworth

If we allow one of the finest and the richest languages in Europe, which, fifty years ago, was spoken by nearly four million Irishmen, to die out without a struggle, it will be an everlasting disgrace, and a blighting stigma upon our nationality.

The unionists also for their part, want to minimise the potential for change, not only on the equality agenda but on the issues of sovereignty and ending the union.