All my family look Irish. They act Irish. My sister even has red hair... it's crazy. I'm the one that doesn't seem Irish. None of the kids in my family, my siblings, speak with an Irish accent... we've never lived there full-time; we weren't born there. We just go there once or twice a year. It's weird. Our parents sound Irish, but we don't.
The English and Americans dislike only some Irish--the same Irish that the Irish themselves detest, Irish writers--the ones that think.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk. . . .
My boy, it's your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.
The vice and drunkenness among the lowering laboring classes is growing to frightful excess, and the multitudes of low Irish Catholics … restricted by poverty in their own country run riot in this … as long as we are overwhelmed with Irish immigrants, so long will the evil abound.
Racism is not nearly as important as poverty. That's the same around the world. What look like ethnic problems are really economic issues. If you look closely at all these conflicts around the world, they come down to poverty and economics and resources. The more poverty, the worse the war.
You need only do three things in this country to avoid poverty - finish high school, marry before having a child, and marry after the age of 20. Only 8 percent of the families who do this are poor; 79 percent of those who fail to do this are poor.
The answer is no, I would rather marry the Demon King himself than marry you. I suggest you look elsewhere for a bride. And heaven help the one you choose.
My parents are Irish, my grandparents are Irish, my great-grandparents are Irish. I was born in England; my blood is Irish.
My mom's family was 100 percent Irish, in the American way of being Irish, and then my dad was half Irish.
Inherently in us as Irish people, wherever you are in the world, when you hear an Irish accent, it's like a moth to a flame. There's a real personable pride and camaraderie about being Irish.
I was actually a single man until I was 41. Rather late. Irish marry late.
And if you look at the reality in the United States, where you have more than 40 million people below the poverty line and 42 million on food stamps, and then you look at poverty around the world, clearly the way we're running the engine of capitalism is not serving us well.
I'm Irish and very proud of being Irish, but as an actor, your extraction should be secondary, really. You should be able to embody whatever character it is, wherever the character comes from. That's always been important, for me. I'm an actor who's Irish, not an Irish actor.
The majority of people who come to America come for a better life, just like the Italians, the Jews, the Irish, and the Polish did in generations before. A lot of the Irish came here back in the turn of the 19th to the 20th century because there were no opportunities and no options at home for them. There were no jobs and there was extreme poverty. They came here to be able to send money back home.
Irish tory employers hid[e] their sweatshops behind orange flags, and Irish home rule landlords us[e] the green sunburst of Erin to cloak their rack-renting in the festering slums of our Irish towns.
Oh dear... it really is rather disillusioning. When one's friends marry for money they are wretched, when they marry for love it is worse. What is the proper thing to marry for, I should like to know?