Quote

Every publisher or agent I've ever met told me the same thing - that Irish readers don't want to read about the bad old days of the Troubles; neither do the English and Americans - they only want to read about the Ireland of The Quiet Man, when red-haired widows are riding bicycles and everyone else is on a horse.

Irish poetry has lost the ready ear and the comforts of recognition. But we must go on. We must be true to our own minds.

I never expected to write a book about a slum in Ireland that was going to catapult me, as they say, into some kind of - onto the best seller list.

Yes... I miss that everyone in Ireland tries to knock some humour out of every situation. I don't think I appreciated that. It's unique to Ireland.

I've also worked hard portraying an Ireland which is fast disappearing. Ireland was a very depressed and difficult place in the 1980s, and I've tried to include that in the script. I worked really hard to find the heart of the book.

Once in my childhood I had been eager to learn Irish; I thought to get leave to take lessons from an old Scripture-reader who spent a part of his time in the parish of Killinane, teaching such scholars as he could find to read their own language in the hope that they might turn to the only book then being printed in Irish, the Bible.

Certain citizens claimed I had disgraced the fair name of the city of Limerick, that I had attacked the church, that I had despoiled my mother's name, and that if I returned to Limerick, I would surely be found hanging from a lamppost.

My first thought when I came here was that I understood why there are so many great Irish writers - because there is something mystical in the air. There's always this cloudy, moody sky and it's challenging.

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 read books by people who have betrayed the Motherland.