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If the British Isles had an official vegetable, it would have to be the potato.

My mum and my husband are from Irish backgrounds, so we have a lot of potatoes. Chips, mashed, boiled, new potatoes, I love them all. Even the slightly wonky ones like Duchess potatoes that go up in a little spiral.

My father's parents were Irish. Only a year before my father died, he and I went back to Ireland for a week to look at the old homestead.

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.

The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.

Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

My father was totally Irish, and so I went to Ireland once. I found it to be very much like New York, for it was a beautiful country, and both the women and men were good-looking.

Ireland never lacked the capacity to feed its people. During the entire 'great famine,' the island continued to produce massive amounts of beef and grain. The Irish just couldn't afford to buy any of it due to the enforcement of rack-renting, high taxation, and suppression of manufactures.

The land of Ireland for the people of Ireland.

We have always found the Irish a bit odd. They refuse to be English.