I Belong To The Middle Class That

Ireland Is A Peculiar Society In The Sense That It Was A Nineteenth Century Society Up To About 1970 And Then It Almost Bypassed The Twentieth Century.

The Rosary Was Said Every Evening. I Always Liked That Sentence About The Medieval Churches, That They Were The Bibles Of The Poor. The Church Was My First Book And I Would Think It Is Still My Most Important Book.

When I Was In My 20s It Did Occur To Me That There Was Something Perverted About An Attitude That Thought That Killing Somebody Was A Minor Offence Compared To Kissing Somebody.

I Suppose . . . In Writing You Can't Have Regrets. I Mean, You Just Get It Down The Way It Was . . . It's Only Wishful Thinking That Things Could Be Other Than They Were.

Everything That We Inherit, The Rain, The Skies, The Speech, And Anybody Who Works In The English Language In Ireland Knows That There's The Dead Ghost Of Gaelic In The Language We Use And Listen To And That Those Things Will Reflect Our Irish Identity.