Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I remember vividly as a 15-year-old, in 1964, seeing Derry play Glentoran in the Irish Cup Final at Windsor Park in Belfast. Glentoran were one of the two big Belfast teams, along with Linfield. Any rural team playing them was up against the odds.
All you would hear every night on the news was that somebody had been shot dead in a certain part of Belfast. We lived opposite a judge, and there were always soldiers crouched down in our garden. We'd sit and talk to them, and I even used to sing to them!
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.
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.
I used to think being in the West would be incredible and then when I was nine my parents moved us to Belfast. I was initially amazed by little things - in toyshops you could actually play with the toys, the schools were more colourful and there were so many magazines everywhere.
The first time I saw Peter Green play was at the Club Rado, which was a very rough club in Belfast, and at that time he'd just replaced Eric in the Bluesbreakers. I'd gone up there to sort of hang out and see if I could meet this guy Peter Green, because I'd read about him and everything.
When I was growing up, Belfast City Hall was surrounded by security, and we had no access to it. But now, people come in and out of it all the time. On a nice day, office workers and students sit on the lawn outside and have lunch. It's great to see how Northern Ireland has changed. To be part of that is fantastic.
I think the poetry that came out of Belfast, and especially the Queen's University set, in the 1970s and '80s - you know, Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Ciaran Carson - that was probably the finest body of work since the Gaelic renaissance, up there with the work of Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory.
