Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We are going to serve our full term; there will be no snap election, and we are going to do our best to ensure that 2016 is going to be a good economic year.
As leader of the Fine Gael Party, I will also use our position in the European People's Party to clearly state our views with our European political partners.
I now know what to do; I know how decisions can be made. I know how you can drive ministers and their departments to actually make decisions and bring results.
If somebody says, 'I am a gay person, and I want to get married,' is their own family going to deny them that? Are our own fellow citizens going to deny them that?
Our revenue commissions are very happy and very clear that they showed no sweetheart deals and no preference for any company and never do and never have and never will.
Our common membership of the E.U. provided an important external context to the Irish and U.K. governments working together for peace. It should not be discounted lightly.
If you were to do it again, you'd probably do some things differently. But the decision is right to have a single entity manage the water and the waste water for a country.
Clericalism has rendered some of Ireland's brightest, most privileged and powerful men either unwilling or unable to address the horrors cited in the Ryan and Murphy Reports.
Populist promises to reverse every tough decision are nothing but empty rhetoric, irresponsible leadership, and bad politics. They are not the solution to Ireland's problems.
My relationship with Alan Shatter is a professional relationship: obviously worked with him over the years, complimented him for his work as a reforming minister, and move on.
Respectability in this country was a bad word because people did things who were in respected professions that let down the entire nation, and we're washing away their sins yet.
COP 21 provides a unique opportunity for the political leaders of this generation to provide lasting foundations for the preservation and sustainability of generations of the future.
Down the country, people in rural areas are struggling to get a speed of even 1 MB, not much better than the old dial-up system we used to have when the system was in relative infancy.
The re-establishment of a hard border on the island of Ireland would be a step backwards and present an opportunity for others, with malign agendas, to exploit for destructive purposes.
It is the young people in whom I place my confidence because of their competence, because of their enthusiasm, because of their capacity to meet the frontiers that are changing every week.
I think - whether it's music, literature, sport, art, whatever you want - there's nobody who can stop us if we only apply ourselves with the singular objective of being the best in the world.
I'm a big fan of Springsteen. Obviously, his social commentary is very powerful for me. I like his album 'The Rising.' It's not a new one, but it sticks in my mind because of what it says to me.
We have so much discrimination in this world - colour, race, creed, all of these things - and there is an issue here that the right of marriage in the civil law is not extended to same-sex couples.
The U.K. and Ireland are like-minded on E.U. matters, and the process of working together in Brussels has built an immense store of knowledge, personal relationships, and trust between our governments.
My genuine belief is that if we can get through the eurozone crisis from a political point of view, we've got a lot of engines that can drive our economy, that will restore confidence and get us moving on.
Failure to curb temperature increases will impact all countries, Ireland included, but with the most immediate and drastic effects being felt, in many instances, by the most vulnerable countries and communities.
I don't take myself too seriously, but I take the job very seriously, and I expect people to do the job that they're given because this is about all our people, young and old, and it's an enormous responsibility.
We link our future to the euro, to the euro zone, and to the European Union while being the nearest neighbor of the United Kingdom with, obviously, a common travel area and a very close working relationship with the U.K.
To me, the real opinion polls are the tangible facts: the growing creation of jobs, the number of planning permissions, the number of commercial vans being sold - the signs that the Irish people are regaining confidence.
Public confidence in, and support for, the euro - and, indeed, the European Union - will ultimately be determined by how well we deliver on growth and jobs rather than on institutional wrangling and complex legal or technical negotiations.
Building on our strong track record of supporting developing countries, including in areas like climate justice, human rights, gender and education, Ireland recognises that vulnerable communities need very considerable assistance in adapting to climate change.
Rather than just saying, like, 'Your economy is the be all and end all,' I go back to my three roots that I've often said about this being best country for business, the best to raise a family in, and the best to grow old in with a sense of dignity and respect.
Irish research will contribute to global progress and have the potential to help all countries realise the potential of their land sectors in addressing climate change - this means reducing emissions, adapting to impacts, and enhancing and improving carbon sinks.
By 2007, an uncompetitive, bloated, over-borrowed and distorted Irish economy had been left at the mercy of subsequent international events without the safeguards, institutions, and mindset needed to survive and prosper as a small open economy inside the euro area.
The world has changed utterly. There was a time when you couldn't marry a Protestant. There was a time when you got married that the women had to give up their job in the public service, and when they got married, they were owned by their husbands. That's all changed.
We must ensure that more binding, durable, and enforceable fiscal rules go hand-in-hand with funding certainty for countries pursuing sound and sustainable economic policies. We need to keep pushing forward towards a comprehensive solution to the challenges of the eurozone.
No politician in a European sense is happy with 26 million people unemployed. Nobody can be happy with 6 to 9 million young people unemployed. You have to give them hope and confidence and a sense of inspiration that the European process is actually about people, not about bureaucracy.
For years, Ireland used to have a philosophy of 'Get them in here to invest and develop in Ireland, and this will sort out our problems.' It is good in the sense of building a trade surplus, but we also want to develop what it is that we offer ourselves and that Irish companies export abroad.
We've got enormous potential, phenomenal potential on our doorstep, which requires politics that makes that work, and that's what we try to show here in Ireland: that while there's a lot of pain, the reward at the end of this is career opportunities, prosperity, and brighter days for everybody.
In Ireland here, the Revenue Commission have always been completely independent of the state since 1923, and they are quite adamant and quite clear that there was no preferential treatment and no special deals, no sweetheart deals, and that Apple paid the taxes that were due on their profits generated here in this country.
You're not going to be able to deliver jobs locally unless you sort out the nation's problems, and that's why the big and difficult decisions about Ireland's economy have been so crucial and so difficult for people to have to accept and have to deal with, but the reality is the people gave this government an unprecedented mandate.