Clericalism has rendered some of Ireland's brightest, most privileged and powerful men either unwilling or unable to address the horrors cited in the Ryan and Murphy Reports.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Ireland and its people have much to be proud of. Yet every land and its people have moments of shame. Dealing with the failures of our past, as a country, as a Church, or as an individual is never easy. Our struggle to heal the wounds of decades of violence, injury and painful memory in Northern Ireland are more than ample evidence of this.
The Irish job was something that had to be sorted out.
There's a real mischievousness about Irishmen, don't you find?
Irish people are pragmatic. They understand that nobody is going to fix our problems but ourselves.
It's not that the Irish are cynical. It's rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody.
No one would ever cast me as an aristocrat. I think the big thing about being an Irish artist is access to melancholy. Especially the American Irish. The availability of loss, some kind of pain, is an important part of who we are. I think my Irishness gave me that.
We've got enormous potential, phenomenal potential on our doorstep, which requires politics that makes that work, and that's what we try to show here in Ireland: that while there's a lot of pain, the reward at the end of this is career opportunities, prosperity, and brighter days for everybody.
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true.
In the country places of Ireland, writing is held in certain awe: a writer was a dangerous man from whom they instinctively recoiled.