Belfast Quotes

We'll be launching the new public prosecution service in Northern Ireland tomorrow. I'll be doing it in Belfast tomorrow. This is an entirely new era, in which criminal justice now exercised on an equal basis, not the old basis in which community division was a feature. (Peter Hain)

When we went to Belfast we saw some beautiful countryside and coastlines.

Sarah Sutton

When I was fifteen, I became a professional musician. I got involved with people and did certain things which led me to start making records and touring. And leaving Belfast and going to London and America, one thing led to another and I got caught up in the life that I'm living now...I was very young and i followed something.

Van Morrison

When I started studying tenor saxophone as a kid in Belfast, I did so with a guy named George Cassidy, who was also a big inspiration.

Van Morrison

I went back to Belfast and started a club, the Maritime. No one had thought about doing a blues club, so I was the first.

Van Morrison

Yet even though that picture is dark and darkening, there is one factor which has not yet been injected. I do not know whether it will be tomorrow, or next year, or in five years; but it will come. That factor is firearms and explosives. With communities which are so divided nothing can prevent the injection of explosives which we know perfectly well from experience in other parts of the United Kingdom and the world. At first there will be horrified astonishment, and inquiry as to what we have done wrong that such things should be happening. Then there will be feverish endeavour to find methods to allay the supposed grievances which lie behind the violence. Then follows exploitation by those who use violence of the ascendancy they have thus gained over the majority and over authority. The thing goes forward, acting and reacting, until a position is reached in which-I shall dare say it-compared with those areas, Belfast today will seem an enviable place.

Enoch Powell

I suspect that the only thing that will take Articles Two and Three out of the Irish Constitution is when the bombs begin to blow in Dublin in the way that they have been in Belfast and in London.

Norman Tebbit

I certainly notice the vitality in Belfast, which wasn't there in the Seventies. There was a war going on then. Now there are cranes everywhere. There really is a sense of renewal and hope.

Liam Neeson

You have a neck. You have a neck. You have a neck. You come in here with your orders from Belfast to make allegations. You have a neck.

Eamon Gilmore

From this farcical Belfast, where anti-Catholic pogroms are occurring daily and where 30,000 Catholics are out of work because of their religion, and where the religious test is imposed on civic and private employment, we have cut ourselves off from as entirely as we have severed British connection. We will never recognize the partition of Ireland. When the time comes, Dail Eireann will be summoned by President Eamon De Valera and it will meet as an all Ireland parliament, independent of England.

Robert Erskine Childers

The thirties were troublesome in Belfast, and then of course there was no work for people, and it was terribly religiously divided. (Frank Carson)

My dad moved to London in his early 20s and didn't really go back. So the irony is I've spent lots and lots of time in Ireland, but not with my dad. I've shot films in Belfast, where he's from. And I've shot in Dun Laoghaire. Which is great. And I've shot in Dublin.

Imogen Poots

Belfast is a city which, while not forgetting its past, is living comfortably with its present and looking forward to its future.

James Nesbitt

Listen, I'm from Belfast. We're not polite people. And it's language. We're direct.

Paula Malcomson

I went to Queen's University Belfast and stayed nine months, then I ran away to be an actor.

Simon Callow

I am here tonight under the most tragic circumstances, with the possibilities of grave and difficult operations in Belfast and in Ulster within almost a few days...I am here to tell you solemnly and honestly that we intend to see this matter through. The cost may be great, the sufferings may be terrible.

Edward Carson, Baron Carson

Belfast during the Troubles looked like a different world.

Clive Owen

He came to the States in 1963, I think with a view to making up with my mother, but that didn't work. He came for three weeks, and drank his way all over Brooklyn. And went back... I went to his funeral in Belfast.

Frank McCourt

It's a rip-roarer, an absolutely titanic struggle if that's the right thing to say about a Belfast man... Make sure the rivets are tight and away you go!

Jimmy Magee