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If I had stayed in Belfast, my life there wouldn't have as easy as it was in Scotland. I see the strain on the people who stayed. Always worrying about the safety of their children.

When I was growing up, Belfast City Hall was surrounded by security, and we had no access to it. But now, people come in and out of it all the time. On a nice day, office workers and students sit on the lawn outside and have lunch. It's great to see how Northern Ireland has changed. To be part of that is fantastic.

I might bump into them because I live in Belfast, and Belfast is not that big a place. You go for a walk, and you walk past Kit Harington. You go for a meal, and there's Peter Dinklage.

The thirties were troublesome in Belfast, and then of course there was no work for people, and it was terribly religiously divided.

The countryside in Belfast is beautiful. No technical wizardry is needed to show quite how glorious it is in its natural state.

The people of Northern Ireland have sorted out my whole life.

Listen, I'm from Belfast. We're not polite people. And it's language. We're direct.

I've always been fascinated with Ireland, especially Northern Ireland, having lived in London in the '80s when there was an Irish republican bombing campaign there.

It's a complicated relationship with the place one grows up in, particularly if it's Northern Ireland.

All you would hear every night on the news was that somebody had been shot dead in a certain part of Belfast. We lived opposite a judge, and there were always soldiers crouched down in our garden. We'd sit and talk to them, and I even used to sing to them!