JF HT Irish Writing Exam Quotes

Making History Facet

"The most basic quality or faced of [Irish] history, a facet that links Ireland's colonial past not only with the Ireland of 1988 when Making History was written but with the Ireland of totday is that of entrapment in circular motion." - Yvonne Lysandrou

Hugh O'Neill

"The archetypal Irishman: an individual who as a result of political circumstance is wholly conversant with English culture but cannot be fully accepted within it, and who by the dint of Anglicization has lost a vital part of his Irishness." - Hiram Morgan

Pentecost about the North

"Pentecost is a hymn to the self-consciousness of that lost time," before "the North entered the nightmare." - Gerald Dawe

Irish as Hugh O'Neill

"We were involved in a wider debate about Irish history - in a sense we were all Hugh O'Neill's, struggling to find out place." - Hiram Morgan

Ruth to Peter

"You don't know your own people, not anymore."

Peter about being in Birmingham

"Exilephilia. The desperate nagging pain of longing to be far, far away."

O'Neill on Sir Henry

""Those Irishmen who live like subjects play but as the fox which when you have him on a chain will seem tame; but if he ever gets loose, he will be wild again." … And then [Sir Henry Sidney] laughed. And everybody joined in."

Writing of Ireland

"The writing of Ireland exemplifies the crisis of representation." - Homi Bhasha

Making History ambiance at the end

"The only light on stage is a candle."

Pentecose ambiance at the end

"The sky above the backyard is growing light."

Making History end

"O'Neill is now crying. Bring down the lights slowly."

Pentecost end

"Personally, I want to live now. I want this house to live. We have committed sacrelige enough on life, in this house, in these times. We don't just owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our dead too… our innocent dead." - Marian

Synge's attraction to the Aran Islands

"Yi-Fu Tuan would describe such an immediate attraction to land as topophilia; "the affective bond between people and place or setting." - Joy Kennedy

Synge on the perserved history on the Islands

"The absence of the heavy boot of Europe has perserved to these people the agile walk of the wild animal." - Synge

Nature in Riders to the Sea

"The door which Nora half closed is blown open by a gust of wind."

The landscape

The landscape of the sea is viewed with awe, practicality, and despair." - Joy Kennedy

Synge's nature

"Synge's use of nautre… is a blend of uniquely Irish ambiguties towards place." - Joy Kennedy

Synge on that on the Islands

"Every article on the islands has an almost personal character… they seem to exist as a natural link between the people and the world that is about them." - Synge

The ocean

"The ocean is both dividing an unifying. It isolates the world of Maurya but this isolation… has also helped perserve Irish folk customs and language." - Joy Kennedy

Props in Riders to the Sea

"The play's props transcend the confinement of the kitchen to reveal the connections, both physical and spritual, between characters and land." - Joy Kennedy

Synge on grief

"The grief of keen is no personal complaint… but seems to contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island." - Synge

Community and place

"The importance of community supplants the importance of place." - Seán Ó Tuama