The first music I was ever exposed to was Irish folk music, like the Clancy Brothers. My father plays that and Christmas songs.
My usual trick with the Irish plays is to set things on islands I've never been to.
I go to Spain a lot, in winter, for a blast of sunlight to banish the blues brought on by the Irish greys and drizzle. I love the cities of the Spanish interior.
Poetry is not Irish or any other nationality; and when writers such as Messrs. Clarke, Farren and the late F. R. Higgins pursue Irishness as a poetic end, they are merely exploiting incidental local colour.
I don't want to, in any way, characterize a race or a people or get accused of racial profiling, but the Irish, as lyrical and romantic as they can be in their poetry, they can be every bit as repressed in their personal relations.
I'm Irish, so I'm messing all the time. Which means, I'm having a laugh. I'm always making jokes.
One of my few childhood memories is as an eight-year-old, refused permission to watch the Hitchcock season on Irish television, sneakily viewing 'The Birds' though a crack in the living-room door. It transformed my hitherto perfectly enjoyable half-mile walk to school, down a country lane patrolled by watchful birds, into a terrifying ordeal.
I have good genes. My father is Danish and my mother is Irish and Native American. They both have good skin.
I'm born and raised in the Northeast. My parents are Irish immigrants. So our tendency is to shy away from the big yellow ball that comes up in the sky every once in a while.
Cursing is heavily used in the Irish language. It's not a stretch for me, and I have no qualms about it. It doesn't fall far from the real me.
Dad's Jewish and Irish, Mom's German and Scotch. I couldn't say I was anything. My last name isn't even Downey. My dad changed his name when he wanted to get into the Army and was underage. My real name is Robert Elias. I feel like I'm still looking for a home in some way.
I miss Irish milk. Probably not as much as Superquinn sausages.
I saw my mother crying for the first time, which made a huge impression on me, when I came home from kindergarten, and she was watching TV because JFK - that Irish Catholic president that we loved - had been killed.
The Italian tough guys, dey talk real deep like dis down in dere chests... while the Irish speak way high-ah, up here in their heads.
Growing up with Bronx Irish parents during an era of protests against the status quo, I was especially committed to doing the opposite of what I was told to do. Forty-four years later, I am left with only one means of making a living: comedy.
My father and his brothers and sisters were childhood Irish jig champions in the Bronx. At our family celebrations, they all get out and do the jig. And of course, the younger generation, me and my cousins and my brothers, we have our own Americanized renditions of the Irish jig, which is a bit more like 'Lord of the Dance.'
When I went to America, I spoke so much about who I was and gave so much away in a confessional, Irish, story-telling way that I suddenly realised I had given up a lot of myself. I had to shut up.
People often ask me why I sing with a strong Irish accent. I suppose when I was five years old, I spoke with a strong Irish accent, so I sang with one, too.
But if republicans are to prevail, if the peace process is to be successfully concluded and Irish sovereignty and re-unification secured, then we have to set the agenda - no-one else is going to do that.
At the heart of the Irish economy has always been the philosophy of tax competitiveness. On the cranky left, that is very annoying; I can see that.
My mother came from an Irish family of 11 kids and, of course, had a sister who was a nun, so I spent time at a convent and with an aunt and uncle who lived in New York and took me to the theater.
Growing up, I was brought up around Irish music, Irish traditions.
If you're Irish, it doesn't matter where you go - you'll find family.
I was Irish; I was a woman. Yet night after night, bent over the table, I wrote in forms explored and sealed by English men hundreds of years before. I saw no contradiction.
I come as one package deal. An Irish lesbian who wakes up every day and goes to work. And I don't spend a lot of time thinking about being 'the first this' or 'the first that' because it would take up space in my brain.
My mother - the Irish side of the family - was very musical. My mother was a singer; there was music around the house all the time.
I'm not Irish. Just because I have red hair doesn't mean I'm a lucky charm, you know?
I love a lot of Irish folk music and Irish folk songs.
I am a political prisoner. I am a political prisoner because I am a casualty of a perennial war that is being fought between the oppressed Irish people and an alien, oppressive, unwanted regime that refuses to withdraw from our land.
Again and again, I find something eerie in many Irish occasions - the unrelenting whiteness, the emotional tribal attachments, the violent prejudices lurking beneath apparently pleasant social surfaces, the cosy smugness of belonging.
You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
It was in a stonecutter's house where I went to have a headstone made for Raftery's grave that I found a manuscript book of his poems, written out in the clear beautiful Irish characters.
My dad lives in Sicily, so I'm half Italian and half Irish - it's a fiery combination.
I was born into an Irish Catholic family in the New York area in this great, wonderful, and safe country, but the Holocaust has always haunted me, and it has long stood as a stumbling block to faith. How could such a thing be? How is that consistent with the concept of a loving God?
I had grown up as an Irish poet in a country where the distance between vision and imagination was not quite as wide as in some other countries.
My family, they're story tellers. My mom is Irish, and my dad is Italian. In my family, we weren't allowed to watch TV while we ate - we had to sit around the table and tell stories about our day.
