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“It is not those who can inflict the most but those who can endure the most who will conquer.”
― Terence Macswiney, Principles of Freedom

“The Irish way of telling a story is a complex and elaborate one, complete with wild exaggerations, a certain delight in improbable fantasy, and a heightened sense of drama.”
― Rashers Tierney, F*ck You, I'm Irish: Why We Irish Are Awesome

“All is changed, changed utterly
A terrible beauty is born”
― W B Yeats, Collected Poems, by W. B. Yeats

“In the 1870s it was estimated that a third of all the money in the Irish economy came from money sent by kindhearted Irish servant girls to their families. The Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank in New York alone would send more than $30 million to Ireland between 1850 and 1880. Many families in Ireland owed their survival to what they gratefully called the "American Letter," a lifeline that helped them cope with brutal poverty and lack of opportunity.”
― Rashers Tierney, F*ck You, I'm Irish: Why We Irish Are Awesome

“Scarlett O'Hara's father, Thomas, is an Irish immigrant who names his plantation Tara, after the home of the High Kings in Ireland. In an appealing nod to the "luck of the Irish," we read that Thomas O'Hara won his lands in a card game!”
― Rashers Tierney, F*ck You, I'm Irish: Why We Irish Are Awesome

“On St. Patrick's Day, the traditional Irish family would rise early and find a solitary sprig of shamrock to put on their somber Sunday best. Then they'd spend the morning in church listening to sermons about how thankful they should be that St. Patrick saved such a bunch of ungrateful sinners. Nobody wore green clothing as it was considered an unlucky color not suitable for church.”
― Rashers Tierney, F*ck You, I'm Irish: Why We Irish Are Awesome

“It's often said that "the Irish built America. The truth is, not only did they build it, they also manufactured, repaired, and cleaned it, especially in the decades before and after the potato famine.”
― Rashers Tierney, F*ck You, I'm Irish: Why We Irish Are Awesome

“For a tiny speck in the Atlantic, Ireland has made an outsize contribution to world literature. It's a legacy we can all be proud of, one that would take many pages (or indeed a whole library of books) to recount in full.”
― Rashers Tierney, F*ck You, I'm Irish: Why We Irish Are Awesome

“I am a war man in the day of war, but I am a peace man in the day of peace.”
― Michael Collins

“A Magnum Paucity by Stewart Stafford

Build the nation's mausoleum,
Light the people's funeral pyre,
For Hibernia's sons and daughters,
In genocide to expire.

Romantic Ireland has no grave,
It died foraging at the roadside for bites,
Or on a coffin ship out of reach of the New World,
An empire's boot on the throat for last rites.

Did you know your identity all along?
Or find it struggling and aghast?
Old Eireann was the first expendable colony,
And egregiously, not Britannia's last.

Constricting stomachs do not growl patriotic oaths,
Freedom is a stranger to a starved mind,
Force-feed our children grapes of wrath,
With liberation dead on the vine.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Whether serving in the military, building industry, organizing politically, or making their way in any other part of American culture, the Irish were determined to create a free and prosperous life for themselves. This Irish-American struggle led to social and political progress for all Americans.”
― Rashers Tierney, F*ck You, I'm Irish: Why We Irish Are Awesome

“With our gift for language and willingness to stand up and be counted, as well as heaps of charm and charisma, we Irish have long been an integral part of American political life.”
― Rashers Tierney, F*ck You, I'm Irish: Why We Irish Are Awesome

“In 1903, Sir James Power, Lord Mayor of Dublin, was surprised to note on a transatlantic trip that the typical Irish immigrant in America was now "not merely a hewer of wood and a drawer of water." In fact, he remarked that they are "found occupying...respectable positions in society.”
― Rashers Tierney, F*ck You, I'm Irish: Why We Irish Are Awesome

“Cork-born Mother Jones was renowned as a dramatic orator who relished props, curses, and all kinds of attention-getting tactics--sound at all Irish to you? She exaggerated her age, referring to strikers not too much younger than herself as "my boys" and donning frumpish costumes to emphasize her "motherly appearance.”
― Rashers Tierney, F*ck You, I'm Irish: Why We Irish Are Awesome

“Nellie Cashman, from Midleton, County Cork, made a mint providing "bed, board, and booze" to the gold and silver miners all over the western US and Canada. She was a prodigious entrepreneur, running and owning numerous stores, restaurants, and hotels in various mining settlements. While working the bar of her hotel, canny Nellie was able to buy a number of very lucrative mines by discretely listening to the gossip of drunken prospectors.”
― Rashers Tierney, F*ck You, I'm Irish: Why We Irish Are Awesome

“Mr.s Kennedy toiled as a domestic servant and used her savings to start a notions and stationery store, which she gradually and skillfully expanded. Bridget's hard work and sacrifice, making her way as a widow in a strange land, established the funds her son P.J. Kennedy used to finance his liquor business. This enterprise was to become the basis of the family's future progress and put Bridget's descendants on a path that dazzled America and forever changed the political scene.”
― Rashers Tierney, F*ck You, I'm Irish: Why We Irish Are Awesome

“James Joyce once called Guinness stout "the wine of Ireland." Indeed it's one of the most successful beers worldwide. Ten million glasses of this ambrosial liquid are consumed with great gusto each day.”
― Rashers Tierney

“The original Guinness Brewery in Dublin has a 9,000-year lease on its property at a perpetual rate of 45 pounds per year--one of the best bargains in Irish commercial history!”
― Rashers Tierney, F*ck You, I'm Irish: Why We Irish Are Awesome

“The illicit Irish homemade spirit, poitin was frowned upon by the Catholic Church, which made its manufacture grave enough of a sin to require a bishop's absolution rather than that of the regular parish priest. Ah, the lengths the Irish will go to for "the demon drink!”
― Rashers Tierney, F*ck You, I'm Irish: Why We Irish Are Awesome

“Well, they may not be civilized, but they certainly are confident—and this confidence is one of the open-handed pleasures of early Irish literature.”
― Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe 

“Banshee cries?â€�
“You know, those creatures that cry really loud when someone from an important Irish family is about to die?”
― Patricia Morais, The Roommate

“There is evidence to support claims that 962 years prior to Columbus setting foot in the Bahamas, Saint Brendan, an Irish monastic priest known as “Saint Brendan the Navigator,â€� looked for the “Isle of the Blessed.â€� What island he found has been lost to history and is still unknown; however, legend names it “Saint Brendan’s Island.â€� Many believe that in his journeys across the Atlantic Ocean he actually landed in America in 1150, or 342 years prior to Columbusâ€� discovery.â€�
Note: Saint Patrick ’s Day was the day of my parent’s anniversary.”
― Captain Hank Bracker, "The Exciting Story of Cuba"

“If history belongs to the winners, legend belongs to the losers.”
― Mark Bulik, The Sons of Molly Maguire: The Irish Roots of America's First Labor War

“Both sets of sectarians held each other in grim embrace, opposing each other but at the same time absolutely dependent, one upon the other. The real fear of both Unionists and the right-wing Nationalists was that this sectarian tango would come to an end and that the working class would vote and act along class and not religious lines.”
― Peter Hadden, Common History, Common Struggle

“I want something for myself, Grania was thinking, staring at her folded and clenched hands.”
― Morgan Llywelyn, Grania: She-King of the Irish Seas

“The power that created me would not have given me such a capacity for feeling pleasure if I weren't meant to use it, Evleen whispered to the man who sat rapt beneath her touch. Your religion wants dominion over our bodies because sex is the one ecstasy they can't control, and they are threatened by any rapture other than that they offer.”
― Morgan Llywelyn, Grania: She-King of the Irish Seas

“I have done what mourning I had to do already; I have no desire to give over more days of my life to satisfy conventions that are not mine. I am of the old religion, Grania; we do not believe in death. And so we do not allow it to triumph over life and twist and torture the living. There is...lifework to be done here.”
― Morgan Llywelyn, Grania: She-King of the Irish Seas

“Women and children were not afforded the rights of citizenship, of subjecthood, of being. They lived under threat of being erased, hidden, buried. This is why my mother tells me - halting, hesitating - that in her day it was the worst thing in the world for a girl to find herself pregnant, but worse still was for her to talk about it.”
― Carmel Mc Mahon, In Ordinary Time: Fragments of a Family History

“We know that now. Vehicles of transportation include, according to the scholar of memory studies Marianne Hirsch, "narratives, actions and symptoms." The stories we tell and don't tell, the actions we take and don't take, the symptoms expressed by a mother holding the trauma tightly to herself, because she refused to burden her children with it.”
― Carmel Mc Mahon, In Ordinary Time: Fragments of a Family History

“Stuck In One's Craw by Stewart Stafford

Nobody's beeswax,' still, you nosily ask:
'Is it the last supper to eat that fast?'
Try blackened potato skin's bitter taste,
A heritage of hunger's grim, gaunt waste.

From Celtic mist, this heir apparent,
My grandparent's grandparent(s),
Survived Ireland's holocaust famine,
As a local catch, not New World salmon.

Crop blight drove their starving plea,
With lots cast bleak to die or flee
Genetic appetite fed the strongest,
Those who eat fastest live longest.

© 2025, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford