journalists-from-northern-ireland

"All my novels are about moral questions ... Most of us want to believe in something: politics, religion, saving the world, and there comes a point in people's lives, usually in their 30's, when their faith is shaken in that belief. A lot of my books have dealt with that moment of crisis. Because I've tried to be truthful, the s rarely solve their problems."

"was the great day of the week. To begin with, there was , early Mass with Holy Communion, or a late Mass where you were likely to see a lot of people. The special thing about Sunday Mass was that for once everyone was doing the same thing. Age, income, station in life, it made no difference: you all went to Mass, said the same prayers and listened to the same sermons. Miss Hearne put loneliness aside on a Sunday morning."

"She came out near the and turned hastily back towards the . The docks were no place for a woman to be wandering about, in among all those rough pubs and the Salvation Army. At , the clock said half-past four. Go home. She walked back toward Camden Street. It began to drizzle but she was thinking about money, so she paid it no heed."

"The street outside was a university bywater, once a good residential area, which had lately been reduced to the level of taking in paying guests. Miss Hearne stared at the houses opposite and thought of her aunt's day when there were only private families in this street, at least one maid to every house, and dinner was at night, not at noon. All gone now, all those people dead and all the houses partitioned off into flats, the bedrooms cut in two, kitchenettes jammed into linen closets, linoleum on the floors and 'To Let' cards in the the s."

"It was never a condom train. We were never going to give control of our sexuality to men."

"We were touching a raw nerve. Women in Ireland wanted contraception. I mean, six children on average. Or maybe more."

"It was massive that the crowd agreed with us because it was against the church. You just knew it resonated with women who thought "I needn’t get pregnant"."

"Her passion and wrath was not scattergun – it had a laser-like focus on calling out inequality and injustice. She suffered no fools but had a kindness and warmth for many."

"As one of the women who took the train in 1971, she set in train an unstoppable wave for equality and a changing of Ireland for the better. That change has not yet reached its conclusion but it would be nowhere if it wasn't for warriors like Nell. In an Ireland trying to emerge from the shadows and find who it was, Nell McCafferty was one of the people who knew exactly who she was and wasn't afraid to enter every battle for gay and women's rights. We all owe her a great debt for this. Nell McCafferty left Ireland a much better place than she found it and she played her part with spirit and style."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."