Authors From Northern Ireland

"You have a minority of activists with incredible power in society who are treating their own extremist views and presenting them as though we've reached an established consensus in society, and it's not true."

"If you're looking for a Disneyfied world of goodies and baddies, Shakespeare isn't for you. But this is precicely the world imagined by the high priests of critical social justice, those killjoys who have invaded the theatre industry and seek to deprive us of our cakes and ale. You're either in lockstep with every aspect of their doctrine, or you're on the wrong side of history. And when an ideology captures an organization, that organization ceases to function effectively and becomes a mere conduit for the propagation of the creed."

"When the fashionable beliefs of our time are imposed onto historical works of art, they are invariably denuded of much of their profundity."

"I don't think that you can be an artist if you are simply trying to gauge what the acceptable point of view is. Or, indeed, if you are using your art as a conduit to express whatever the vogueish ideology of the time happens to be. And that is what has happened. If you go to any theatrical production in the [United Kingdom] now, nine times out of ten it will be a sermon disguised as a piece of entertainment."

"What the activists did to comedy insofar is they were expecting audiences to sit there, hear the joke, assess whether it was morally pure, and then laugh to endorse the point being made. And that's not how laughter works."

"One of the great curses of this world is the human rights industry. They justify terrorist acts and end up being complicit in the murder of innocent victims."

"The dark shadow we seem to see in the distance is not really a mountain ahead, but the shadow of the mountain behind - a shadow from the past thrown forward into our future. It is a dark sludge of historical sectarianism. We can leave it behind us if we wish."