My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
My dad grew up in Banbridge, Northern Ireland, desperate to get to London. I grew up in London, so I don't know what it's like to yearn for the big city from a small town.
I think a lot of us who grew up in Northern Ireland weren't politicised enough, frankly.
It's an extraordinary thing, this tiny little province of Northern Ireland, where carnage happened. And I was part of it. I grew up in it.
Northern Ireland has a unique place in the Union. As the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement enshrined in law, the people of Northern Ireland can be British, Irish or neither.
I was one of the many kids in Northern Ireland who grew up in the countryside and had an idyllic childhood well away from the Troubles.
My father was from Northern Ireland, and coming from somewhere like that, your faith defines you. That's something we don't really understand outside Northern Ireland, but because of my parents and grandparents, I've experienced it.
What were once only hopes for the future have now come to pass; it is almost exactly 13 years since the overwhelming majority of people in Ireland and Northern Ireland voted in favour of the agreement signed on Good Friday 1998, paving the way for Northern Ireland to become the exciting and inspirational place that it is today.
I am a proud product of Irish golf and the Golfing Union of Ireland and am hugely honoured to have come from very rich Irish sporting roots... I am also a proud Ulsterman who grew up in Northern Ireland. That is my background and always will be.
I am a proud product of Irish golf and the Golfing Union of Ireland and am hugely honoured to have come from very rich Irish sporting roots I am also a proud Ulsterman who grew up in Northern Ireland. That is my background and always will be.
I grew up in Derry, of course, and it was - Derry was the worst example of Northern Ireland's discrimination.
The country I live in is never clear about its name. My passport says 'the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,' and citizens of the U.K. may call themselves British, English, Scottish, Welsh or from Northern Ireland.
When people are faced with a choice between the Northern Ireland they have got and the perfect Northern Ireland, they complain. But in the real world that isn't the choice.
People were so keen to get investment. In those days, there was quite significant unemployment in Northern Ireland, and that had been the general pattern in Northern Ireland for many, many years.
I grew up in Northern Ireland, didn't have a lot of money and getting over to Glasgow to watch a game was probably a lot to expect from my mum and dad.
Both the U.K. and the E.U. have made a sincere commitment to the people of Northern Ireland: there will be no hard border. Equally, as a U.K. government, we could not countenance a future in which a border was drawn in the Irish Sea, separating Northern Ireland from the rest of the U.K.