I went further and further back through the centuries to get a sense of perspective but now at least I understand why Irish history evokes such strong passions and emotions.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I think there's something about the Irish experience - that we had to have a sense of humor or die.
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.
I have encountered on this long road an enthusiasm for an Irishness which will be built on recognising again those sources from which spring the best of our reason and curiosity.
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.
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.
I had studied Irish history. I had read speeches from the dock. I had tried to fuse the vivid past of my nation with the lost spaces of my childhood. I had learned the battles, the ballads, the defeats. It never occurred to me that eventually the power and insistence of a national tradition would offer me only a new way of not belonging.
Sometimes the archaism of the language when it's spoken is why we are all in love with the Irish today.
Look around at the countries of Europe, and you'll find that practically all of them have pasts that are just as tragic as Ireland's, yet the people seem able to find some creative way at moving into the future.
Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.
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