Earth receive an honoured guest; WilliamYeats is laid to rest: Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.

-Auden,W(ystan) H(ugh)
  'In Memory of  W.B.Yeats', pt.3.

Sitting as huge as Asia, seismic with laughter, Gin and chicken helpless in her Irish hand.

-Barker, George Granville
  'To My Mother'.

   My name is Behan, Brendan Behan, after Saint Brendan, who got into one of our little Irish boats called a curragh one day in the sixth century and sailed across the Atlantic and found America, and when he'd found it, like a sensiblemanheturned around and sailed back and left it where it fuckin' well was.

-Behan, Brendan Francis
  Speech in NewYork.

   Other people have a nationality. The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis.

-Beethoven, Ludwig van
Richard's Cork Leg (1961).

Irish hurricane, a flat calm with drizzling rain.

-Bowen, Frank Charles
  Sea Slang, a Dictionary of the Old-Timers' Expressions and Epithets.

Look at the Irish! Theyare the cleverest propagandists extant, and managed to persuade most people that they were a brave, generous, humorous, talented, warm- hearted race, cruelly yoked to a dull mercantile England, when,God knows, they were exactly the opposite.

-Buchan,John, 1st BaronTweedsmuir
  The Three Hostages.

He turn'd him right and round about, Upon the Irish shore, And gae his bridle reins a shake, With, Adieu for evermore, my dear, And Adieu for evermore!

-Burns, Robert
  'It was a' for our rightfu' king', stanza 3.

Onthegreenbanks of Shannon, when Sheelahwasnigh, No blithe Irish lad was so happyas I; No harp like my own could so cheerily play, And wherever I went was my poor dogTray.

-Campbell,Thomas
  'The Harper', stanza1.

I remember on one occasion, when she was asked to sing the English version of the touching melody 'The Red-Haired Man's Wife', shereplied,'Iwill sing it for you; but the English words and the air are like a quarrelling man and wife; the Irish melts into the tune, but the English doesn't.'

-Carleton,William
  Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, introduction.

They fought as they revelled, fast, fiery, and true, And, though victors, they left on the field not a few; And they who survived fought and drank as of yore, But the land of their heart's hope they never saw more, For in far, foreign fields, from Dunkirk to Belgrade Lie the soldiers and chiefs of the Irish Brigade.

-Davis,Thomas Osborne
  The Spirit of the Nation,'The Battle-Eve of the Brigade'.

Whenever I wanted to know what the Irish people wanted, I had only to examine my own heart and it told me straight off what the Irish people wanted.

-DeValera, EŁ  amon
  Speech to the Irish Parliament, 6  Jan.

To marry the Irish is to look for poverty.

-Donleavy,J(ames) P(atrick)
  The Ginger Man, ch.2.

If there is a distinctive Irish experience, it is one of division, exacerbated by the fact that division in a country so small seems perverse.But the scale doesn't matter.

-Donoghue, Denis
  We Irish.

The Irish are the niggers of Europe†An' Dubliners are the niggers of Ireland†An'the northside Dubliners are the niggers o' DublinöSay it loud. I'm black and I'm proud.

-Doyle, Roddy
  The Commitments.

Sir Patrick Rackrent lived and died a monument of old Irish hospitality.

-Edgeworth, Maria
  Castle Rackrent,'An Hibernian Tale'.

Did the Warwickshire militia, who were chiefly artisans, teach the Irish to drink beer, or did they learn from the Irish how to drink whiskey?

-Edgeworth, Maria
  Castle Rackrent,'History of Sir Conolly Rackrent'.

I never met anyone in Ireland who understood the Irish question, except one Englishman who had been there only a week.

-Fraser, Major Sir Keith Alexander
  House of Commons, May.

Irish Americans are about as Irish as Black Americans are African.

-Geldof, Bob
  In the Observer, 22  Jun.

It seems that the historic inability in Britain to comprehend Irish feelings and sensitivities still remains.

-Haughey, CharlesJames
  In the Observer, Feb.

It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking-glass of a servant.

-Joyce,James Augustine Aloysius
  Ulysses.