OUR old friend Anon said: "The Irish: be they kings, or poets, or farmers, they're a people of great worth. They keep company with the angels and bring a bit of heaven here to earth."
Not all quotes about the Irish have been quite so complimentary, of course. Many, certainly, do celebrate Irishness, but others have pointed to the darker traits of ourselves and our country people. Here, we list 18 of the most illuminating.
Gnarled trees – do they sum up the Irish character? (Picture: iStock)When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.
Edna O’Brien, Clare-born writer
Ireland is the mystic land of the past. This is the land of the Celtic Twilight, the country of Synge and Yeats and Stephens. It is the seat of an age-old tradition, of the remains of a once brilliant Celtic civilisation.
Conrad Arensberg, an American writer, poet and scholar, giving his opinion of Ireland and the Irish in The Irish Countryman (1937)
Jack Nicholson pictured in lighter mood (Picture: Noel Vasquez/Getty Images)I'm Irish. I think about death all the time.
Jack Nicholson
Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry / Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still / For poetry makes nothing happen.
W.H. Auden, English poet, from In Memory of W.B. Yeats
I am troubled, I’m dissatisfied, I’m Irish.
Marianne Moore, a US poet, critic, translator, and editor
It's not that the Irish are cynical. It's rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody.
Brendan Behan
We have always found the Irish a bit odd. They refuse to be English.
Winston Churchill
Irish politics — just all smoke and mirrors? (Picture: iStock)Our Irish ancestors believed in magic, prayers, trickery, browbeating and bullying. I think it would be fair to sum that list up as Irish politics.
Tyrone writer Flann O’Brien
Talk runs free in Ulster, as elsewhere in Ireland; it has a rougher cast, less grace and fancy; whether among Catholic or Protestant, you find everywhere an outspoken independence.
Stephen Gwynn, Irish journalist and writer
I'm Irish!...When I feel well I feel better than anyone, when I am in pain I yell at the top of my lungs, and when I am dead I shall be deader than anybody.
Morgan Llywelyn, an American-Irish writer and historian
To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an American sociologist and member of the Democratic Party
Award-winning Dublin novelist Iris Murdoch (Picture: Evening Standard/Getty Images)I think being a woman is like being Irish…Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time.
Iris Murdoch, writer, philosopher, born in Phibsborough, Dublin
If there were only three Irishmen in the world you'd find two of them in a corner talking about the other.
Argentinean writer María Brandán Aráoz
British politician Reginald Maudling (Picture: Robert Stiggins/Express/Getty Images)God, what a bloody awful country. Get me a large Scotch.
British politician Reggie Maudling, after his first visit to the North of Ireland in 1972, to the hostess on his aircraft home
I feel like an exile at heart – the call of the North is always there.
Belfast-born Mary McAleese, former President of Ireland
The Normans have much to answer (Picture: iStock)So why is all this happening? The long answer involves the Normans landing in Ireland 800 years ago, and the short answer isn’t much less tortuous.
The Guardian newspaper on the imbroglio in the North of Ireland
Our island is dangerously tilted towards England and towards Rome, good places in themselves, but best seen on the level. Everybody is rolling off it and those that remain, struggling hard for a foothold, drag each other down. Modern Ireland tilts less, for all its troubles.
Irish writer Hubert Butler
Our traditional music sets us apart (Picture: iStock)Our folk music is crude, exciting, jagged and primeval.
Writer and journalist
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