Irish Politician Quotes

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

There was no sex in Ireland until the BBC came.

Oliver J. Flanagan

Running around like a blue-behind bluebottle waving slogans.

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.

Whoop it up for liberty! After Ireland is free, says the patriot who won't touch socialism, we will protect all classes, and if you won't pay your rent you will be evicted same as now. But the evicting party, under command of the sheriff, will wear green uniforms and the Harp without the Crown, and the warrant turning you out on the roadside will be stamped with the arms of the Irish Republic. Now, isn't that worth fighting for?

I would by no means wish a daughter of mine to be a progeny of learning.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

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.

Conor Cruise O'Brien

Let Surgeon MacCardle confirm you in Hope. A jockey fell off and his neck it was broke. He lifted him up like a fine, honest man; And he said "He is dead; but I'll do all I can."

Oliver St John Gogarty

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

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

A European war might do it.

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.

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

Bernadette Devlin McAliskey

There is but one Earth, tiny and fragile, and one must get 100,000 miles away to appreciate fully one's good fortune in living on it.

Michael Collins

I think marriage is primarily about children, main purpose being to propagate & create environment for children to grow up. Its a good policy for society to support male/female marriage imo.

Lucinda Creighton

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

Charles Haughey

The flowers anew returning seasons bring!
But beauty faded has no second spring.

Ambrose Philips

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

Edward Macnaghten, Baron Macnaghten

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.

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.

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

I have been lately introduced to the famous Thomas Paine, and like him very well. He is vain beyond all belief, but he has reason to be vain, and for my part I forgive him. He has done wonders for the cause of liberty, both in America and Europe, and I believe him to be conscientiously an honest man. He converses extremely well; and I find him wittier in discourse than in his writings, where his humour is clumsy enough.

Higgins: Is [assassination] only justified if the target is a reactionary, anti-democratic, anti-human rights obscurantist like bin Laden?
Enda Kenny: I know you are a good Christian man who has your job to do in here from a political point of view. Many of his victims in the twin towers in New York were of Irish descent or directly Irish.

This rooting out of the Irish people; this transplanting of them from their native home into a foreign land, may be all very well, so far as the young people are concerned; but for the fathers and mothers who have reared families in Ireland, it is immediate decay and death.

Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa

... it is impossible I could have been in two places at once, unless I were a bird.

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.