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And all the way now from Navan
and the banks of the Boyne, Dr. Pierce Brendan Brosman.
Of course I wear suede on a bloody hot day
and the sun's coming down.
Say, tuck your shirt, good Lord.
Lick your lips, sit up straight.
It was a great introduction for Bond.
When I was on the tour with the Bond movie,
every time I had introduced the film,
I would go to the back of the theater just to watch.
Wayne Michaels was the stuntman.
Wayne Michaels jumped off that dam,
spent two weeks there going up on the dam every day,
and the conditions were not right.
The conditions were not right.
Then one day he stood up on the dam
and the conditions were right
and he just stood there.
Took the swallow dive pose, looked up,
and just as he was about to dive off,
the Italian crane driver who was hoisting him
back up on the bungee just went...
You have to keep that dive.
You have to keep the horizon line all the way.
As soon as your head turns, you're inverted.
That's it. Snap.
So he did it twice.
Did it twice. Quite extraordinary.
It was a great opening for the movie.
It was a great opening for my career as James Bond.
I think "GoldenEye" is one of the best.
You know what I mean? It's iconic.
Of course, the irony of an Irishman
playing James Bond
didn't escape the funny bone of my life.
I just accepted it and I think people accepted it.
I don't think there was any heavy-handed
criticism or anything like that to my playing James Bond...
as an Irishman.
Hmm.
Quite extraordinary time in life.
Quite extraordinary. Powerful.
The feeling coming at you like a tsunami was just...
I remember saying to Keely, the day I got the job.
The phone rang and it was Fred Specktor, my agent,
and Kevin Huvane, and they said, "It's yours.
It's all yours."
I remember putting the phone down and saying to Keeley,
"Hold on to your hat. This is going to be...
It's going to be one wild ride."
Ten years later, it was.
My name is Pierce Brosnan, and we're at The Surfrider
here in Malibu.
Malibu's been home forever.
I dropped in here in '82 and I came to the seaside.
I was in the Hollywood Hills to start with, and
that kind of felt like a home,
but it was a little distant and...
The ocean dragged me to it, and so,
I've been here ever since,
and it's a good part of the world.
I love LA, I hate LA.
I love LA and drives me nuts.
I fly in over it and think, "Why do I live here?"
But I live out there at the beach.
It's gorgeous. It's been good to me.
Yes, I'm from Navan, County Meath.
I grew up on the banks of the river Boyne.
My father, God bless him, Tom Brosnan, he--he...
went off into the hills and never to return.
So my mother was a young mother,
and being a single mother in the '50s,
in a very...
closed environment
and Catholicism really did
kind of...
mangle somewhat the lives of many people,
even though there was
the prayer to God and Jesus and happiness.
But, uh...
the marriage didn't work out,
and being a single mother in those years,
they made you feel it.
A cloistered town, like Navan,
there was no escaping.
My mother left when I was a young lad
to be a nurse in England.
That was her courage and her glory,
and thank God she did,
and she went off to make a life.
So I lived with my grandparents,
then an aunt and an uncle.
One way or the other, Navan is
very much part of my life.
And you acknowledge that. It's your roots.
It's who you come from.
It's the seed and the bone and the flesh
of your soul somewhat.
And then when I was eleven years of age,
my mother finally found her footing in England
and got her nursing degrees and sent for me,
and we were reunited.
So those first eleven years of my life
were very, somewhat solitary.
But I think it's what gave me the interior life of an actor
and of an artist, and made me the man I am today.
So I landed in London and was reunited with my mother
on the same day that Ian Fleming passed away.
I didn't realize that for many, many years.
The sun was shining.
I was looking...
for the cars with the big wings.
I thought they were there, but they weren't.
They were just little cars like in Ireland.
And we lived in Putney.
Number 72 Chelverton Road, Putney.
My mother and stepfather took me to the pictures,
Putney High Street.
First film I saw, "Goldfinger."
I'd never seen the likes of it.
I was just bedazzled.
I was good at art and I was good at English,
and my essays were strong. The art wasn't bad.
I left school at 16 with nothing
but a cardboard folder of drawings,
paintings of flowers, plants, people.
And I got a job,
again in Putney, drawing straight lines,
Watering the spider plants
and making cups of tea for the three other guys.
And that was it. I was an artist.
I almost went into the army, almost became a cop.
I would have been a good soldier, I think.
Would have been a good cop.
Acting, really...
acting kind of came out of the blue.
One day I was hanging my coat up in the studio,
talking to a colleague from the photographic department,
talking about movies.
And he said, "You should come along
to the Oval House Theater."
I said, "What is it?" And he said, "It's an arts lab.
They do workshops."
I went along and that was it.
This other world revealed itself to me,
and also my inner self too.
And workshops, which were
the beginning of my own analysis...
as an artist.
I got cast in an American production,
"The Manions of America,"
six-part mini series on the Irish potato famine.
So Ireland came back into me,
came back into my life.
I was unknown. My late wife Cassie said,
"You know, we should go to America."
I said, "How the hell are we going to go to America?
We just bought this house in Wimbledon."
She'd just done a James Bond movie, "For Your Eyes Only."
I've done the six-hour miniseries.
I said, "This is too stressful, no, no.
I want to do a play at the royal court."
And she said "No, we should go to America."
I said, "But we don't have the money."
And she said, "I'll find a way." And she did.
She took out a second mortgage on the central heating.
Sent me down to the bank manager in Raynes Park
to get an overdraft for £2,000.
Said I had a job. Big lie. Little lie.
She was right, you know. She was absolutely
on-the-nose, pitch perfect right.
Got the overdraft. Freddie Laker used to do
cheap flights to LA.
100 quid. Bring your own sandwiches.
Friend of mine said, "You can stay at our place."
It was right there on the strip.
Had a room in the back, a waterbed.
Rented a car from Rent-A-Wreck.
Got to Hollywood. Got an agent.
Very first interview. Across Laurel Canyon.
My God, here I am. I'm in Hollywood.
I'm going for a job.
I'm in this beat-up old piece of crap car.
I'm going for a job.
It blew up and I had to walk down, CBS.
They were looking for Remington Steele.
I said, "I'll do it."
I screen tested. I got the job.
I worked my tail off. It was so stressful.
10, 12 pages a day, dialogue,
but I was good on dialogue. I was fast.
I played with a lot of alacrity.
Back then I did, anyway, coming out of the theatre,
coming out of English speaking theatre.
Tongue.
Precision. Precision.
So I would rattle through the dialogue and they'd write more.
You know, at this, I could make a career.
How much pride did you have then
when Remington Steele shot an episode in Ireland
at a time when there was no real film or tv industry?
Uh...
Well, I was very proud.
I think that's...
probably an understatement.
Here I am with an American TV series, "Remington Steele."
I played Remington.
It's 1984, the Olympic Games are coming to Los Angeles
and we decide to take the show abroad.
And I said, well,
"Remington is an enigma. We don't know who he is.
Why doesn't he go look for his father?"
Remington looks for his father, Pierce looks for his father.
It all dovetailed rather well.
But I loved the movies.
I wanted to be up there
in some wild dream, some notion.
But, you know,
that's just a notion. That's just a dream.
The actual practical doing of day-to-day living
is get a job, go to work.
Get a job, do it well,
come home, do it again,
as an actor.
So Keely and I are still trucking down the road here,
30 years,
sorting the world out.
And the boys are grown
and we want to go back to Ireland to make movies.
We have a couple of ideas,
so we know enough people over there now
to raise a bit of money and
make a "fill-im."
Welcome to the 20th IFTA Awards ceremony
taking place here tonight
at the Dublin Royal Convention Centre.
I think what's quintessentially Irish
is that whatever is happening at the time,
we'll claim it.
We're "glic out." We're clever,
We claimed Obama. We claim whoever we want.
I left when I was a young boy.
I left when I was six.
There's something about people here,
they're so kind.
In the darkest of times, there's a great sense of humor.
My dad's homemade brown bread.
That's what's quintessentially Irish to me.
Are we good at trying to hide things from people,
cover, you know... not being totally open?
Sometimes, like, bare-faced honesty,
and it's quite shocking.
Brendan Gleeson,
red hair, charming,
gift of the gab.
They're all Irish traits, I think.
So it sounds like I'm in the tourist board now,
but an openness,
and maybe it's because of age
and the difference between when I was young
and what happened to the country.
Suddenly there was this huge curiosity of the world.
My missus is French, so I spent a lot of time in France.
And their idea of who the Irish are
is a great rootedness,
a great openness,
a great joie de vivre.
We're a mysterious and complex people
with lots of traumatic legacy behind us.
A quintessential Irish characteristic
has to be the Irish welcome.
And it was something that I noticed living in London
five years, took me a while.
And I went back home and everywhere I looked,
somebody was warm to me.
Someone helped me, someone held a door for me.
Someone said, "Oh, that's my favorite chocolate bar, too."
That's the Irish welcome.
It expects nothing back in return except to
give you a little bit of kindness in your day.
And that, for me, defines Ireland.
You say you're from Ireland and people
immediately are warm to you.
Other people get jealous, like,
why does everyone like the Irish so much?
You may find Irish people are socially
or politically judgmental,
but they're personally very tolerant.
Are there quintessentially Irish characteristics
or traits that you find?
Of course there are.
I wouldn't be here if there weren't.
I'm married to an Irish girl and she's my savior.
I'm Anglo-Saxon,
with all the sort of heavy German boringness
that that brings.
And she is a Celt, a will-of-the-wisp,
a difficult, edgy thoroughbred,
and comes from a family of storytelling
and comes from a country which has survived on that.
There's something deeply...
mystical and powerful about the Irish.
What it is,
it's very hard to define,
but we certainly bring it out in song, in our writing,
the way we spiritually kind of connect to the world.
The idea of Irish has come
from the thoughts of Irish people,
from the poets, to the history, to the language.
But what is largely forgotten
is the natural aspect of Irish,
the plants. It's the nature, it's the landscape.
We have certain natural characteristics as a nation
to do with connectivity, to do with humor,
and to do with, dare I say it, crack.
-And what is crack?
Well, let's just say it's not a legal substance.
It is a spontaneous fun that the Irish have,
the ability to laugh at ourselves,
the ability to create a party for any occasion,
and having good crack.
I think compassion.
I think we must have the courage
to stand by our compassion.
No matter what the adversity is,
it's that incredible spirit of never giving up.
I'm here. Yes, I have my hopes
and aspirations and great dreams,
but I fear nothing and so I'm free.
That is what makes Ireland such a great country now.
My wife, Greta, who's from Perth in Western Australia,
her first day in Ireland,
I tried and failed to find a pub
that had traditional music, having promised her
she would have this great treat of traditional music.
So I went into this pub and I was getting desperate,
so I asked the lady behind the counter,
"Do you know any place in Kenmare
where there might be Irish music?"
She said, "Sure, I'll play for you."
And she pulled down a fiddle and started playing.
She would play, she would finish,
pull a few pints and start playing again.
And for me, that was the essence of Ireland.
That was Ireland at its best.
And I can always say
I played with the Irish Youth Orchestra.
Can I say that? Can I say that?
"Going to the pictures," that's a great phrase,
"Are you going to the pictures?"
Michael D. Higgins is a great character,
full of bonhomie and mischief.
This passion for the arts and
the creativity of souls and the harmony of people.
Huge fan of Michael D. I think he's a great president.
He's done a huge amount for the country.
The present strength of a multi-skilled
creative film community
on the island of Ireland
is the result of committed,
loyal supporters of film
and decades of work.
I think it was very important that when I became
the first Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht,
that I had experience with the community
involved in filmmaking.
So therefore it was never for me
going to be simply a commodity.
The late Prime Minister Albert Reynolds,
he met me and he said, "Michael,
what do you need to get it all going?"
I said, "I can get all of this running quickly
for 15 million."
Everything I did was against the tide.
I was accused regularly
that I was building an empire. I was.
We immediately,
immediately had five major projects.
I knew that difficulties had arisen
in relation to the making of "Braveheart" in Scotland.
And Mel Gibson himself came
and there was a four-hour meeting.
We said, "We can help, yeah."
At that meeting, Chris O'Grady negotiated
30 first assistant posts at every level,
including an assistant to Mel Gibson himself.
And that became the model of our scheme.
You could make any film in Ireland now
and you wouldn't have a skill shortage.
"Braveheart" came to Dunsany.
The church scene, in which the French princess marries,
was filmed right over there.
I was ten years old, hiding in bushes,
and there was this homeless-looking man.
It was Mel Gibson, dressed in costume.
Big biceps, not very tall.
And I thought to myself,
"There's the 'Lethal Weapon' guy."
And I thought, "Isn't this fantastic?"
And I followed him around
from behind, peering,
watching him direct,
and I knew I wanted to do the same,
and if I could have the biceps,
that would also be good, too.
We have been very lucky in Ireland
to have such outstanding acting talents,
production talents.
It tells us that you have, in fact,
put a structure in place
to make everything possible.
Whatever small contribution my policies made,
that was just a contribution to a structure
that makes other things possible.
It had been my dream.
Ross White, accompanied by Oscar.
- Pleasure to meet you. - I saw your [indistinct].
It isn't just the director and the script writer.
It's all those who make it possible,
and those, in fact, actually
who provide the hot meals at the breaks.
The Republic of Ireland today
is a country with a past that tugs at your heart
and a future that's shaping the world.
And it's a global force in culture and the arts
and evidenced by the 14 Oscar nominations
went to Irish artists this year,
The pride, the bród,
that we all felt like, seeing
the Irish takeover at the Oscars.
Best director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor,
Best Supporting Actress,
Best International Film for "An Calín Ciúin."
It's extraordinary.
I love that film.
It just broke my heart
because of my own aloneness as a child
of being wanted or not wanted.
You hear things, you see things.
"Calín Ciúin." Stunning piece of work
by this man and wife team.
It's lovely to see Irish films be celebrated.
Colm Bairéad.
We're the first Irish language feature film
to be nominated for the Oscars
and the first time an Irish film
has been nominated in this particular category,
which is the international film category.
And of course, an Irish person is famously
associated with the Oscars themselves.
The golden statuette is designed by Cedric Gibbons.
There's an Irish wave certainly coming to Hollywood.
Hopefully the luck of the Irish will follow us, too.
I was so moved by the warmth conveyed
in the award-winning live action short film
"An Irish Goodbye."
"An Calín Ciúin," which made history.
The journey has been absolutely extraordinary for us.
It's been a complete whirlwind.
We've been at the BAFTAs and the Oscars.
- Now it's the IFTAs. - Yeah, I mean,
I guess it worked out pretty well, right?
Winning an Oscar is fantastic.
And it's so special to be here tonight
at the IFTAs, you know, the final stop on the journey.
To sort of finish at home
makes it extra special for us all.
Quintessentially Irish.
I mean, we're great at congratulating ourselves.
And here we are at the IFTAs.
Next presenter,
the greatest man that ever lived,
Mr. John C. Reilly.
I know what you're thinking,
What the hell is he doing here?
Well, I couldn't get a seat at the Oscars
because there are so many Irish people there this year,
but I thought I'd try my luck here.
The culture and traditional writing
in this country is so profoundly rich,
and there has been a real gear shift
in terms of the way that Ireland
is presented on screen.
There's less of the old Irish tourist board
presentation of this country.
We've got great dramas and here we have a drama
that's full of Irish women who look gorgeous.
Nobody's peeling at any point in the kitchen.
You know? It's just fantastic.
And the winner is
"The Banshees of Inisherin."
Is part of the huge success of "Banshees"
the fact that it's quintessentially Irish?
No, I think it's a story told in a particular idiom.
The fact that you can tell a story
in the Irish idiom, in the Irish landscape,
give it an epic quality,
maintain a very ordinary sense of humanity within it
and do extraordinary things with it.
So that's where I think the success is.
It's not that it's Irish, it's that it's good.
What is so wonderfully, quintessentially Irish
- about Sinead O'Connor? - Ooh!
Goodness. Oof.
I think her ability to tell very authentic stories.
Her voice is quintessentially Irish.
I think she sounds like a keening
from the depths of ancient Ireland,
the most fabulous icon
we could be lucky enough to have.
So, yeah, that's what I think about Sinead.
So I was in a tiny little village
in the south of France last week,
and I went to the local village hall
where there was a production
of "Da" by Hugh Leonard.
And I don't understand French,
but opposite me were an Irish family
who didn't understand French.
And the rest of the hall was filled with
French people who thought it was hilarious and very Irish.
And there's this sense of the absurd,
which the Irish absolutely, inherently,
seemed to understand.
Perhaps it's to do with the nature
of the people in the country itself.
Add to that the diaspora
and the people who profoundly associate themselves,
often mistakenly, with this country.
Then you've got a lot of influence.
We like society.
We're not solitary people.
That's why when we go abroad, we engage
and we connect very well.
I've been in many countries
where I've seen Irish communities.
They make an impact
above and beyond what the numbers might suggest.
As an island community,
we're surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean,
north, south, east and west.
And we go beyond the Aran islands,
then the next step after that
is the east coast of America.
We do travel.
As a people, we have travelled far.
Every corner of the world has an Irish man,
a woman there somewhere
left to seek fame and fortune.
The prime minister of New Zealand was called Muldoon.
The prime minister of Australia was called Keating.
The prime Minister of Great Britain
was called Callahan.
The prime minister of Canada was called Mulroney.
The president of the United States was Reagan,
and--wait for it-- the president of France,
de Gaulle, traced his origins back
to the McCartans in County Down.
It is kind of like an extraordinary empire
which wasn't built by military might or force of arms,
but just by the fact that so many people
left this island.
And the bad news is that, like,
10 million people in history have left Ireland.
But the good news is that 10 million people
in history have left Ireland
because what we now have is a phenomenal global tribe.
We've no plans to invade anybody soon.
I think the last time we had a home win was
1014 against the Danes.
We haven't had great success since then.
You see manifestations of this Irish diaspora
in all sorts of places, like James Hoban,
who built the White House.
And in these rooms, we see the dreams
of one Irish builder made real.
When George Washington
chose James Hoban to design the White House,
the young architect had his credentials
from the Dublin Society.
The Irish played a huge part in building America.
A million people left Ireland
mostly for the United States
between 1815 and 1845.
And they're established when the great famine wave comes,
when 2 million people go.
The Irish between 1815-1845
are described as Protestant and prudent.
They are now property owners in Boston and so forth.
They're not necessarily welcoming 2 million people
coming in on top of them.
So you begin to get the scatter of the Irish
throughout the United States.
Most of them are descended from post-famine emigrants.
And those people left Ireland with a sense of grievance
about the circumstances that had led to their departure.
When they arrived in America,
they were not warmly received by Americans.
There was a party in the 1840s and '50s
that wanted to send the Irish home,
and therefore they banded together.
The Irish proved themselves to be assets to America,
and that transformed the image of Ireland
in the United States to the benefit
of our country going forward from there.
And one of the key moments was the Civil War,
where Irish people joined the Union forces.
Those who came into New York very often were recruited
within weeks and were off fighting in the Civil War
under the leadership of Thomas Francis Meagher,
a good Waterford man like myself.
Irish America is a remarkable phenomenon.
Many Irish Americans are 4th, 5th, 6th generation,
and yet a surprising number of them
have an affinity with Ireland,
an affiliation with Ireland,
an affection for Ireland that is hugely beneficial
from an Irish point of view.
There's a difference between Irish-born people
who live in the United States, for example,
and Irish Americans.
They are not the same people. They are different tribes.
And very often people who may have a series
of other ethnic definitions in their background
don't choose them, but they choose the Irish one.
The Americans want to love the Irish.
They want to be more Irish than the Irish are themselves.
I don't believe that Ireland would have
become independent in the way it did in the early '20s
had it not been for the influence of Irish America.
And likewise, I'm not sure that the Good Friday Agreement
would have emerged in in the way it did,
but for the influence of Irish Americans,
persuading the Clinton administration
to take an active interest in Ireland.
I remember being in Belfast during
those months leading up to the final agreement in 1998.
The word would go round-- the White House is on the line!
Which meant that President Clinton,
the busiest man in the world,
was picking up the phone to ring politicians
in Northern Ireland to urge them
to make those final moves,
to make a compromise and a settlement possible.
You have all heard the expression,
every St. Patrick's Day,
every Irishman goes out
to find another Irishman to make a speech to.
Well, that's why I'm here.
The St. Patrick's Day festivities in Washington, D. C.
would not happen because Ireland's a jolly good country.
No, it happens because Irish Americans
are a jolly good community.
You visited the White House.
How proud were you to be at that reception?
It was a proud morning.
It was a chilly morning, but the food was good,
the hospitality was great.
President Joe Biden, he was very gracious to me.
We had a good chat about Ireland and fishing.
The taoiseach of Ireland.
I don't know how many countries there are
that have an annual date in the calendar
for a meeting with the US president,
the sheer extraordinary pleasure
of an occasion like that.
Some of my European colleagues in Washington
were tearing their hair out at how
we could pull off this one
and have a full day in Washington devoted
to Ireland's prime minister.
And I know people at home in Ireland
can be cynical about these things.
"Oh, it's all a bit of blarney."
No, it's not.
You get a chance to sit down
with the most powerful person in the world for an hour.
And then you meet that person over lunch for an hour,
and then you spend an hour with them
in the evening at a reception at the White House.
So this is an extraordinary blessing and boost for Ireland.
Niall Horan.
Happy Paddy's day, everyone.
And for the Americans,
that's not with two Ts, that's two Ds.
When I was sat down to write my first album,
the first thing that came to my mind
was my hometown of Mullingar.
And... emotional. Um...
It's a song called "This Town,"
and it's about, effectively,
an immigration song about traveling the world and
knowing that I'll always have Mullingar to go back to.
And the chorus basically says,
if the whole world was watching,
I'd still dance with you.
And it's effectively about my hometown.
If you know the words, you can sing along.
If you don't, good. That's fine, too.
Where have you been hiding?
It's a wonderful day to be Irish in London.
We'll paint Trafalgar Square Green until Friday,
and then we'll paint the England rugby team Green
- on Saturday.
Take it easy.
We want to celebrate our Irishness,
our language, personality,
our love of music and literature,
all aspects of life.
We celebrate St. Patrick's Day,
and he might be Welsh or wherever he's from, but sure,
all we want to do is party anyway.
St. Patrick, who is known often as our patron saint,
is ironic because he's not traditionally Irish,
because he was a foreigner.
Not Irish. That's very surprising to me.
Was St. Patrick Irish?
Of cour--no. No, he's actually English,
and then he got taken into Ireland.
I know the story.
No, I don't believe he was.
Is that meant to be a trick question?
No, he wasn't, actually. But that's okay.
He's a great brand ambassador. Do you know what I mean?
It's great to have him. Don't like snakes, so.
My only issue with St. Patrick's Day
is why did we have to pick a festival
in the middle of March, which is usually
the coldest month of the year,
with an easterly breeze that cuts through everything.
And as a child and as a grown adult,
standing by, reporting on things,
I've stood around in the cold too often on St Patrick's Day.
I wish we had it in June.
He is buried in County Down,
our neighboring county,
and he was a shepherd on Slemish Mountain.
We usually have a little get-together
with friends and family.
We have to keep that tradition alive.
The palace is turned green.
The Niagara Falls has been turned green.
What I call the greening tower of Pisa.
And now in the White House. An amazing feat
that our country has that ability
to appeal to people around the world,
even those that have no...
ancestral connection with Ireland.
Thank you very much, those with links to Ireland.
Those of us without links but pretend
to have links with Ireland.
We're really grateful for the massive contribution
the Irish have made to our city
in culture, in music and in the arts.
Previous generations, the people that I met,
the older people who were still there in Britain
after maybe 50 years living in the country,
they had built Britain, in many cases, with their hands.
The Irish that came in the period
leading up to my arrival in London,
were designing Britain.
They were actually operating at a very different level.
The Irish have given some service to Britain
over the years and we kind of run the place,
really, if truth be known, you know.
I mean, I don't think anyone would dispute that.
All of you seem to have English accents.
Do you consider yourself Irish?
- Of course, yeah. - Of course. Of course.
We just interviewed three of your friends.
- Yeah. - Are they Irish?
No, they're plastic paddies! I'm the only true Irish!
I feel sorry for plastic paddies.
These are the people who truly want to be Irish,
but don't know what Irish is.
But a plastic paddy is a person who
never grew up in Ireland,
never grew up with any of the Irish traditions,
doesn't know anything about Ireland,
but would like to be Irish.
Was that a bit cruel?
There's quite a few of them.
I know some people say,
"Oh, we should definitely cast those people aside."
No, they're our people.
Irishness comes in different shapes and forms.
Plastic paddies, a really shameful description,
because I think it's impossible actually to
define Ireland without reference to its diaspora.
First of all, they bailed us out,
literally from the famine and beyond.
And then the children of these Irish immigrants
really valued their Irish heritage
when they went to school and so on.
They not only saw themselves as American or British,
but they also were very proud of their Irish heritage
and really put that on the table.
And as a result of that,
they faced a lot of discrimination.
Then when they returned to Ireland,
they weren't accepted as Irish either.
So they really were isolated, shot by both sides.
To throw an accusation that they aren't proper Irish
is hugely insulting because they are,
and because the current Ireland wouldn't be where it is.
It wouldn't have the global networks
that have enabled multinationals to locate here.
You wouldn't have the social networks
where people in Ireland can show up anywhere
and there's a warm, welcoming hand.
I don't think people on the island of Ireland
are appreciative enough of
what the international diaspora have done for us.
My grandfather had a small 15 acres
of very poor land in West Claire
and got up every morning and milked four cows
at 4:00 in the morning.
And my father didn't want to inherit that.
My father met my mother and they immigrated to New York.
And my father got involved in the travel business
with Thomas Cook,
with Aer Lingus at Kennedy Airport,
and then set up his own business
and then did the typical paddy: came home to buy a pub.
I think my family's story is just a mirror image
of thousands more.
When I'm doing an All-Ireland Hurling Final on the radio,
I like to reach out not only to the Irish,
but the descendants of the Irish.
You are part of us.
You might be 3,000 miles away,
but no matter where you are, you are family.
In times gone by, we had JFK coming to Wexford.
We had Ronald Reagan. We had Joe Biden recently,
who had clearly strong roots with Louth and Mayo.
As the great-great-grandson of the Blewitts
of County Mayo and several are here today...
President Biden traces his Irish ancestry
to County Mayo, as do you.
What is it about the west?
I don't know.
There must be something in the air or the water.
Don't get me wrong, I love the other parts of Ireland too,
but it's true that the west has a special atmosphere.
It's not an easy climate. It can be very wet and windy.
That usually creates good character
and toughness to face life.
Every American president is a little bit Irish
- on St. Patrick's Day.
But some are more Irish than others.
And, um...
I think it's fair to say that today
we're celebrating our national day
with a president who is
unmistakably a son of Ireland.
Is Joe Biden Irish?
I guess he thinks he's Irish and I guess that's what matters.
If he wants to be Irish, let him be Irish.
President Biden is considered so Irish
that his Secret Service code name is "Celtic."
AÁINE LAWLOR: The man is proud in his heart
and his soul to be Irish,
and we saw that on his visit here to Ireland.
You know, that wasn't any political theatrics.
As the Irish saying goes, "Your feet will bring you
where your heart is."
That was a real connection he'd made, all the way through.
So you're not cynical about it at all?
You know, politicians have hearts, too.
Sometimes.
Sentiment is a very powerful force in human affairs.
The fact that Joe Biden is sentimentally Irish
is, I think, a huge bonus for Ireland.
Thank you. Thank you. Wonderful to be back.
Mr. President, what are your
quintessentially Irish characteristics?
I'm not going to presume.
I'll let others make that judgment.
He's not just saying he's Irish for the crack
or like, saying it to make people happy.
He's obviously saying it to try and draw in
other people who are loving their Irish roots.
They're going to cash in on anything they can,
but it made for an interesting view.
Put it like that.
President Joe Biden is a proud, patriotic American,
but he's also someone who prides himself
on his Irish heritage.
And he is, by the way,
the most Irish president since John F. Kennedy.
And indeed, he's always wore his Irish identity
on his sleeve, on his heart.
Whereas in the case of Kennedy,
Kennedy was a little more circumspect about it,
because at that time, back in the '60s,
being an Irish-American
wasn't necessarily the advantage it carries
in the years since that time.
Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama
have more in common than just being Irish-Americans.
Both Biden and Obama are descended
from Irish shoemakers who emigrated to the States
in the 19th century.
You know, I know it sounds silly,
but there's so many Irish-Americans,
like my relatives who got here,
got to America in 1844, '45 and '46
who've never been back here,
and they talk about it.
Mr. President, why do Irish shoemakers
make great presidents?
Isn't that amazing?
My great-great-grandfather
left from the same port
five weeks later after Barack's great-great-grandfather,
and the idea that they both would
seek a new life
and think that their great-great-grandsons
would end up being president of the United States.
That's remarkable.
That's the Irish of it.
President Barack Obama,
he spoke eloquently about his Irish connections.
The great landscape of history of Ireland and America,
the men and women who created this country
came out of desperate times, dark times, the famine.
I love when Obama came to Dublin,
his very funny speech about being Barack O'Bama
from Moneygall, but somehow
the apostrophe was dropped along the way.
Mr. President, thank you for spending
so much of your precious time on our beautiful island.
Thank you for coming home to us.
My name is Ricky Simms. I'm a sports agent.
I'm from Milford in County Donegal. I live in Monaco.
Growing up in Milford,
which is a small village outside Letterkenny,
it's a farming community.
I was a sports-mad kid.
I played all kinds of sports.
My opportunity was with a club called
Finn Valley Athletic Club,
which was one of the biggest
athletics clubs in Ireland.
I always say I was good in Donegal,
but I never made it to the Olympic Games
or the world championships. I was never really good enough.
When I started working with the Kenyan athletes,
I realized it was time for me to stop running,
because they were way, way faster than I could ever be
if I ate, slept and trained for the rest of my life.
But I had a talent for organizing
and managing and coaching,
and coming from Donegal
doesn't mean you have to stay at home on a farm.
You can go and try and do things around the world,
and that's where I got really connected
to international athletics.
I met Sonia O'Sullivan,
who was a big hero in Ireland,
and her coach and agent
was Kim McDonald, who ran one of
the biggest athletics agencies in the world at the time.
Traveling to world championships and seeing how it all worked
gave me the appetite to have a career in that area.
Mo started with us in 2000.
Usain started 2003.
In 2012, Usain was the face of the games.
Mo was maybe the second most famous athlete there.
One of the iconic photographs from 2012
was of Usain doing Mo's celebration,
then Mo doing Usain's celebration.
That was a good picture.
Who took that picture?
So it was my idea to get a picture.
Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- I said, "Okay, let's get it." - Get a picture, yeah, yeah.
There was probably 100 photographers, like,
swarmed round and got the photo.
If I'd got it myself, I probably could have sold it.
We've been together so long,
I have a lot of stories, so he's nervous.
Yeah, we do.
Ricky has meant a lot to my career.
To find somebody that believes in you
and believes in your career
helps to propel you to be the best person you can be.
It doesn't happen every day.
When I started, I struggled a lot
with injuries, ups and downs.
It wasn't smooth sailing,
but Ricky always treated me the same,
and for me, that meant a lot.
So when I actually made it,
it was my way of showing, like, you know what?
You were loyal to me, so I'm gonna be loyal to you.
We have developed this big family
that is just a wonderful thing.
One thing I would say about him
throughout the championship,
he's not--he's not as cool as he looks.
You know what I mean? He worries.
You know what I mean? No matter how well
I'll be doing through the season,
he's the worrier in the group.
He worries, you know what I mean?
- Thanks for adding that. - No, I'm just saying.
- You gotta have a Plan B. That's him.
You need a Plan C and a Plan D.
That's the only thing I would add,
that he's the worrier in the group.
This is why I enjoy being around him, man.
I'm always laughing. He just lighten the mood
so it's always a fun time.
Unless he's worrying about me.
So I'm funnier than I look?
I wouldn't go that far. But--but--
You're--you're decent.
The Irish and the Jamaicans are very, very similar.
We don't take ourselves too seriously.
We like to have a bit of fun.
They love Guinness in Jamaica.
Actually, the most popular drinks
are Guinness and Hennessy.
Ireland's a cold Jamaica,
and Jamaica is a hot Ireland.
So for me, our cultures mash together,
and I think that's one of the reasons
why me and Ricky gets along so well.
One thing we have done throughout the years
is that we just become instinctive.
He understands me as a person.
He's watched me do so much interviews,
if you ask certain specific questions,
he can answer exactly, almost word for word...
- I've heard it all before. - how I would answer questions.
I've never said this out loud,
but he has done a few interviews for me
without asking.
Usain Bolt has never actually been in Ireland,
which is quite hard to believe.
I hope he comes there one day.
It's not my fault.
- Oh, it's his fault. - It's his fault, yeah.
Definitely his fault.
Every time they ask me, I'm like,
"I'm waiting on Ricky."
I can't go without him.
So hopefully he'll make it to Ireland
and have a pint of real Guinness,
not the stuff he drinks in Jamaica.
The premiere of this film in Ireland
will be the-- This'll be the perfect--
I went to a small school on Harcourt Street
in Dublin called High School.
Obviously, the most famous old boys,
we call them, was William Butler Yeats.
But he did mention about his time in High School.
He said, "My schooling interrupted my education."
I think that put the school
maybe on the back foot a little bit, I believe.
Yeats was very good friends with my great-grandfather.
In fact, they used to play chess.
My great-grandfather used to
beat the living life out of him in chess,
which I think created some awkward moments.
I'd like to think that Yeats
got a lot of influence from Dunsany,
because when you walk the lands of Dunsany,
how can you not be absorbed by the nature?
My name is Randal Plunkett. I'm the 21st Lord Dunsany.
Once a bodybuilding meathead
to vegan rewilder
and protector of the animals here.
Here in Ireland, we are the oldest family
still associated with one place.
So among our people, we've had my father,
who was an artist,
my grandfather, who was a soldier
who fought Rommel in Africa.
Horace Plunkett, the founder of the co-ops,
helped start the Women's Association.
And he spent almost all our money
building 2,500 schools.
Because he had an idea, and the idea was,
we are now a republic.
But the way to truly be free
was to stand level with the British
through education.
Saint Oliver Plunkett--
or Oliver Plunkett at the time---
was arrested. They found him guilty,
and they hung, drew, and quartered him
and then set him on fire.
He looks a bit like my father even now,
so that's kind of grim,
and, in fact, I have the same bone structure.
And if you look...
here and look at the painting,
you will see some similarities.
Yes, we've been here a while.
Bit like that old pair of shoes
that you can't throw away.
So this is a large estate that was
traditionally a large farm.
Out of that, one third is rewilding.
Now, we removed chemicals, we removed farm animals.
We allowed everything just to become natural.
What happened was the succession plants came
and things just started booming,
and nobody understood. Nobody knew what I was doing.
So they thought I was a decadent millionaire
sitting on a good Meath land, wasting it,
something that his ancestors would be ashamed of.
People started seeing the animals.
He had salmon, otters, hares, deer,
foxes and pine martin, red kites, woodpeckers,
drilling away in the morning, keeping me up.
We embrace the smaller things of being Irish.
This is not a museum, and yet it is a museum.
It's a home, but a home that is also a museum.
I don't consider myself to be an owner. I don't own this.
I'm a caretaker, a steward,
and I have a little tradition, and it's a family tradition.
The next generation decides whether you have
earned a place on that wall.
You know, everything that we have
in this place is donated to us by a Dubliner.
One day we had
a "'lecky," an electrician,
in fixing the lights here in the museum.
When this electrician was a boy,
he was asked by his teacher
to write a letter to someone
who used to live in his house.
And him and his family went back
and they did a bit of research,
and they found out, lo and behold,
Sam Beckett himself used to live in his house.
And he wrote to Sam.
Samuel wrote back, talking about his love for the house,
his memories with his brother, the room that he was born in.
Genius, as always, Beckett signs it.
"If you ever see my ghost in house or grounds,
"give it my regards.
Yours antiquatedly, Sam Beckett."
Oscar is, I think,
one of the most quintessential Dubliners,
you know, for one, because he didn't stay.
Many think that he's British.
Oscar Wilde, of course, quintessential Londoner.
I still quote Wilde now in my speeches.
One of my favorite Oscar Wilde quotes is,
and it applies to this Tory government.
"They know the price of everything
but the value of nothing."
Can you quote any James Joyce?
Oh, God. And I've just been playing James Joyce.
That's a low blow. That's a low blow.
James Joyce, for me, is
the greatest novelist of the 20th century.
He left Ireland as a young man in 1904.
In the last 37 years of his life,
he only returned to Ireland three times,
and yet practically everything he wrote
was set in the Ireland he left in 1904.
And he wrote about that incessantly,
and forensically, and brilliantly.
He gives us a picture of this country
which is an Ireland on the cusp of change.
The great political transformation took place
a decade later when Joyce was already writing "Ulysses."
What people don't maybe know enough
in relation to Joyce's continual contact with Ireland
as it was being heard,
was he kept Raidió EÉirea on
practically day and night as his sight was fading.
When he was buried, the local ambassador writes over
to the Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs,
and the question is, "Did he die a Catholic?"
"If he didn't, better to be safe" and so forth.
For goodness' sake.
Well, I have seen James Joyce's passports
on display at the University of Buffalo,
where they have a huge collection of Joyce material,
and they are both British passports.
James Joyce famously
didn't have an Irish passport.
- Yeah, yeah. - He traveled on a British one.
Does that make him any less Irish?
No, it doesn't. It absolutely doesn't,
particularly for what he's done for our country.
James Joyce actually set up
the first-ever cinema in Ireland.
Did he? I never knew that.
Does it still exist?
There's a Penneys
commemorating the Volta cinema.
What a shame it's not there still.
Have to do with the plaque.
James Joyce should be acknowledged
for his forward thinking and his passion for cinema.
Yes. Not many people know.
He saw, I think, very early on,
and it's there in the writing
of how images are very important.
It didn't succeed not because of Joyce,
but rather because it was specializing
in international and foreign cinema,
and the market for that in Ireland at that time
simply wasn't great enough to be able
to sustain a venture of that kind.
Well, it's Bloomsday today.
The festival is normally a week after Bloomsday,
but it corresponds today, and so we did a reading
this morning, my wife and I,
to celebrate one of Ireland's greatest writers, Joyce.
"Quick warm sunlight
"came running from Berkeley Road swiftly,
"in slim sandals, along the brightening footpath.
"Runs... she runs to meet me,
a girl with golden hair on the wind."
To be able to read that aloud...
hopefully will open up the book
for some people who maybe
didn't get all the way through it
or never read Joyce.
You know, I'm an Englishman.
I was glad the audience seemed to accept
that I didn't have an Irish accent.
My wife made up for that with her Molly.
"She doubled a slice of bread
into her mouth, asking,
What time's the funeral?
"Eleven, I think," he answered. "I didn't see the paper."
The audience certainly seemed to accept it
because in a way, the accent isn't important
if it doesn't ring out of the dialogue,
which with Bloom, it doesn't really.
"Did Roberts pay you yet?"
"9:20."
"What had Greta Conroy on?"
"9:23."
"What possessed me to buy this comb?"
"9:24."
I hope a lot of people will go to the library here,
buy a volume and take it home and try it,
realize that it's not as impenetrable
as people sometimes think.
"He allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly
"as he read,
"reading still patiently,
that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone."
"Hope it's not too big. Bring on piles again.
No, no, just right."
In England we tend to have--
I swear, I mustn't generalize,
but we tend to have rock festivals everywhere.
In Ireland it's slightly more
mixed in its culture.
I mean, of course, we do have rock festivals here too,
but there's other stuff.
I think it's all part of the fabric of this society
and the society I'm very pleased to be a-blowin' in.
It's a wonderful weekend. I don't want too many people
to come because then it'll get too big.
The occasional person should come.
James Joyce. WB Yeats. Jack Yeats.
I started to collect Irish paintings
when I started to have some money.
Art is something you don't buy for profit.
You buy for what you enjoy the look of it.
And it's only when it's not there
that you actually miss it,
because you take it for granted after a period of time.
But when you just take it off the wall,
even if it's loaned it to a museum, which I did, it's--
"Where's my painting?"
I'd be shocked. The room was totally dead.
And I found that, to my horror, loaning a painting,
I was giving a bit of myself away for that period of time.
Did you know that there was
a big art robbery in the Tate?
No, I didn't. How did they get away with that?
Oh, she was beautiful painter. Yeah, I remember this.
The theft in 1956
of a priceless piece of French impressionist art
from the Tate Gallery in London
was the art heist of the century.
Hugh Lane was born in Cork of modest means.
He came to London and became
the preeminent art dealer
for British and international art.
Hugh Lane opened the first contemporary art gallery.
He wanted Dublin, Ireland,
to have its own contemporary art gallery
and left this incredible bequest of contemporary art.
He was quite in debt at this stage and
he had arranged a great sale
which he personally had to go to the States on.
He had some kind of a premonition,
and he changed his will,
which had gifted and granted
his private personal collection
to the National Gallery of Ireland,
to the people of Dublin.
That will had not been witnessed.
Sir Hugh Lane went down in the Lusitania
and could not see his great desire and ambition
to create a world class collection
of impressionist art in Dublin.
Monets, Manets, Renoirs,
the Tate gallery here held onto them.
"They're too good for you.
"You haven't got somewhere to put them,
and then it'd be lost, it'd be wasted on you."
My uncle decides
that he's going to right this historical wrong.
Paul and Billy were doing this
out of a sense of moral righteousness.
51 years after the will was made,
the moment came. The guards were off,
and they go about the heist.
"Jour D'EÉté" by Berthe Morisot
is the picture they're going to swipe.
Uncle Paul lifted it off the wall,
walked out the door.
The photographer was waiting as planned,
and took the iconic picture.
All of the papers globally had printed the picture
knocked off all of the stories from the world headlines,
including the marriage of Grace Kelly to Prince Ranier,
drawing attention to a...a...
a kind of great national outrage
that had been committed upon the people of Ireland.
That sounds ridiculous!
It's not ridiculous.
That's not ridiculous.
I'm making it sound like the famine here.
If we can at least get it back onto Irish soil,
the gesture will have been made.
The Irish embassy in London immediately handed it back.
"The Independent" in London managed to get hold
of a redacted file on the events.
And it was quite clear
that at the highest ministerial level
in the British government, the decision was made
not to make martyrs of Paul Hogan and Bill Fogerty.
Sarsfield Hogan, my grandfather,
was called by Dubliner DCI McGraw of Scotland Yard.
"Your boy is on the ferry.
"He'll be at the north wall at 7:30 in the morning.
You can pick him up. He's not to come back."
They effectively got away scot-free.
The publicity generated led to further discussions and
it was decided that the pictures could be shared.
They came to a compromise whereby
they co-own the paintings
and they rotate between the two institutions.
That is a great legal fudge.
The pictures must finally be returned
to their rightful home, which is Dublin,
in the municipal gallery in Parnell Square.
It is in effect the Irish Elgin marbles,
and we want them back.
We want them back in Dublin where they belong.
Really, enough is enough.
Now bring them back home.
It would be rude not to.
I'll have to put my thinking hat on here, you know.
"Thomas Crown 2."
Hugh Lane played an inadvertent role
in making Ireland the modern,
thriving economy that it is today.
Paul Hogan's father, Sarsfield Hogan,
who is a leading civil servant in the Irish government.
Sarsfield Hogan fully expected to become
the first secretary of the Department of Finance.
But because his son was involved in
a diplomatic incident,
he was overlooked for promotion.
And a young TK Whitaker was appointed in his stead.
The visionary for the modern Irish economy,
he created policies that made Ireland less protectionist
and more international-looking
from old Ireland to New Ireland.
So the Tate gallery theft was the butterfly effect
that really led Ireland
into its period of economic prosperity.
When I was born, Ireland was objectively
the worst educated population in Europe
and it's now the best.
My generation was the first generation of Irish people
to have the opportunity
to be educated to the highest level.
Remember, my first year at school was
the first year of free education introduced in the 1960s.
Most of the people that I met at college at that time
were like me, experiencing university education
for the first time in their family history.
That has been the transformative element
that has caused our country to be changed,
changed utterly, in the words of WB Yeats.
When I first went abroad,
Ireland was the poorest country in western Europe
and I ended up in Berlin opening a Primark store.
I've also gone from representing an Ireland
that really was identified with its whiskey,
Guinness, and very little else.
What brings multinationals here? Is it the weather?
No.
They're coming here for a number of reasons.
Literally for the first time in 100 years,
the dominant industry worldwide was extremely footloose.
You had companies like Microsoft, Facebook,
Google, Intel,
all who were knowledge-based, looking to grow globally.
Ireland has access to the European market.
So suddenly now we are not at the edge of Europe.
We're actually a small island at the center of the world.
We've got a highly educated workforce,
we speak English.
Culturally, because of our diaspora,
are totally in sync,
and we've got the lowest corporation tax in Europe.
And bingo, you've got the perfect storm.
So, timing was bang-on.
I mean, they started thinking in the late 1980s--
they said, well, okay, there are gonna be
three big sectors that are gonna be really important--
IT, which was no great prizes for it,
but they also thought about pharmaceuticals, biotech,
and they thought about a thing
which nobody was thinking about that much,
which is medical devices.
In each of those areas now, you've got eight and nine
of the top 10 companies in the world in Ireland.
My wife got a Fulbright. We both came over.
She was basically studying the Irish video game ecosystem
to see if there's anything that could be improved
in the economy for the games industry.
What it means is that now there's a tax credit for us
developing games in Ireland.
That's when we opened our Irish game studio,
so we moved from Silicon Valley right to Galway.
It feels like the beginning of something really cool,
and the country's amazing.
The people are amazing. Great place to live.
One of the things with the kind of economy
that we've developed is that it's two economies, isn't it?
And this is an extraordinary economy.
You know, it produces a lot of very well-paid people.
Uh, it--it obviously employs
highly educated people from Ireland,
but also, of course, from everywhere else,
which makes Ireland very, very expensive, of course,
and then makes it very hard to live
for people who are not in that economy.
The story of the Irish Derby,
when we run the Irish Derby with Zagreb
is a very interesting story, because that particular day,
Dermot Weld did not want to run the horse,
and I insisted the horse ran,
and the horse ran away with it.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's your winner Aidan O'Brien!
It's the Dubai Duty Free Irish Derby Day
here at the Curragh.
It's just a historic race in the flat racing calendar.
It's the most prestigious.
How does Aidan O'Brien celebrate an Irish Derby?
Listen, no, we'll go up,
and we'll have a cup of tea now and relax.
The Irish Derby is our most important race.
It's probably one of the best race courses in the world.
It's one of the sports that we're able to compete
at the very top, our breeding, at show jump and racing.
Irish horsemen do well all over the world.
They're everywhere.
So, it's great that the Irish Derby
is as important a race as it is.
When it comes to the equine industry,
you know, it's--it's something that a lot of Irish people are--
are just good at, is working with horses.
The horse racing industry has been for decades
subsidized by the Irish government.
73 million euros was given last year.
For every pound the government puts in,
they get so much back into the exchequer.
It was a very enlightened piece of legislation, in 1969 it was,
when they created an industry out of nothing.
The stallions were tax-free, but at least the industry
got started by getting help from government.
We need people from all over the world
investing in their horses in Ireland,
so we need to encourage it rather than hinder it.
It's like wealth in general.
It'll come to where it's welcome.
One of the main constraints with the Irish economy
is that we're small.
So, in order to counter that, we've had to use tax breaks
in order to overcome those early disadvantages.
But now the Irish economy has reached critical mass.
At the moment, Ireland is
the ninth largest investor in the USA.
In 2019, for example,
we invested more in the USA than France,
which is a real demonstration
that we have real substance in the economy now.
More than 100,000 Americans these days
are employed by Irish origin companies.
What an extraordinary shift and change
we've seen in a generation, you know, from beer and biscuits
to now being a high tech center in Europe.
When you think of Ireland,
is there anything that comes to mind?
Beer.
Leprechauns.
- The accent. - Uh... potatoes.
When I first opened my restaurant,
people were like, "Oh, you're gonna serve potatoes."
And although they meant it in a humorous way,
it's a joke that steeped in a lot of sadness.
It's a--It's a joke that we were so reliant
on the potato because of the nutrition.
There was so much nutrition in a potato
that with a small patch of land out your back garden,
you could feed a family of 10,
and that's why we were so dependent on it.
So, there's something deeply sad about someone
joking about me loving and Irish people loving potatoes
when we loved it because it was actually how we survived.
Um, so it's what-- That was a bit dark and gloomy.
Sorry about that. But it is a bit sad,
the idea that people think they're cracking a joke
when actually they're kind of slagging off our--our dark past.
I tell you one thing for sure,
I'm shocked how many English people slag off
Irish people's drinking.
I'm like, um... I've been to the English pubs.
I think they're quite fond of a tipple themselves.
They say the definition of a real Irishman is somebody
who doesn't go to bed the same day they get up.
We do like our social activities.
We do like to lubricate them sometimes with alcohol.
Aye, he's a good drinker.
- Not anymore. I think he's-- - Used to be.
- I think he's getting shaky now. - No.
Well, we all know the Irish quite like
a little drop of red wine every now and again.
There's like an ongoing joke globally,
that, like, all the Irish are all alcoholics.
Like, it's not--it's not a great reputation to have,
but, you know, it's not necessarily completely wrong.
Ireland is a country that is oftentimes put in a box.
We love that box. We thrive in that box.
We use it for tourism. We use it for industry, absolutely,
but it's ours to use.
People are very ready to weaponize
what they understand about Ireland
but are never willing to learn what they don't understand.
I remember I was at an event at the Irish Embassy here,
and there was an Englishwoman there,
I said something about something being very different in Ireland,
and she was just like, "But how is it different?"
And I was just like, "It's a different country."
You're telling someone where you're from,
and if they go, "Oh, yeah, so Britain." No.
I didn't realize that there was
that ignorance outside of Ireland.
Like, it was painful to see
Paul Mescal be mistaken as British.
The French claimed Samuel Beckett
because he often wrote in French.
The English--in fact, we interviewed Sadiq Khan,
the London mayor, who called Oscar Wilde a Londoner. Um...
He doesn't get out much.
If they wish to appropriate us Irishmen and women
and make them theirs, then so be it.
There's enough of us to go round.
Gotta have a sense of humor about these things.
Really, take it lightly. Take it lightly.
My father told me a story
when he first came to London in the '60s--the signs he saw
outside the guest houses and the B&B's.
"No Blacks, no Irish, no dogs."
It was a sharp... intake of breath
to be the outsider
and to realize that you were different
and somehow maybe didn't belong.
It was, uh, you know, from being taught
by the Christian Brothers in Navan,
which is a whole other story, uh...
You know, uh...
few children to this comprehensive school system
of 2,000 children.
It was a short, sharp shock.
Being Irish,
how were you received in your new school in London?
Oh, I was definitely made to feel Irish.
They didn't let you forget that you were Irish,
which I wore as an emblem of pride.
They wouldn't say my name, Pierce,
or couldn't say my name, Pierce.
I was known as "Irish."
That was my nickname, and, uh, and--
and I took it and wore it with pride.
You learn how to adapt,
and I suppose in some respects it was the start of performance
'cause I had to assimilate. I had to blend in.
I had to lose the accent.
Ended up talking like that, ya know?
All right, mate? All right, yeah.
So, I was with all the lads.
I enjoyed that company and that life,
and I kind of created a mystique for myself,
falling in with the guys
that were the hard guys, the hard nuts,
but I wasn't really a hard nut.
I just, uh...
I just went with them to protect myself.
Older Irish people that I met when I was ambassador in London
have told me about seeing these signs of, you know,
"No Irish need apply here."
That's changed because Irish people have changed it.
Phil Lynott not only showed up as an Irishman in the UK,
but he showed up as a Black Irishman.
Shane MacGowan, second generation Irish,
forming The Pogues
and coming out with "Fairytale of New York,"
and, really, through the Irish creativity
and hard work and so on, they broke down those barriers.
There's over 7,000 Irish pubs outside of Ireland.
I think there's more Irish pubs outside of Ireland
than inside of Ireland.
Yeah, anytime you're away anywhere,
and you see an Irish pub, you're just like,
ah, there--there we are.
But, um, I guess they're just pubs here.
They're just not Ir-- uh, typically Irish,
but they're just pubs.
Everybody that opens an Irish pub
should have it in a contract
that they have to go spend some time in Ireland
to learn how to pour proper pints.
It's a point of gathering, you know, when you go--
when you see an Irish pub somewhere, you know--
you know that you're gonna have a good time, good beer.
It's quite fun to see there's a real atmosphere,
Also, of course, a place where you are able
to meet other Irish people.
Have you been to an Irish pub ever?
Just in Dublin, but I don't drink beer, just wine. Sorry.
Ah, yes, sure.
Because I lived in Dublin, so it's very great experience.
So, Guinness--it's good.
I love Guinness. I love the stout.
Everybody loves "Gin-ness."
What is it to be Irish, actually?
Well, it's not just having a pint of Guinness,
that's for sure.
Any Irish person mention they're Irish,
and the word "Guinness" is usually one of the first things
that people bring up.
Implies that we're drunks, basically, yeah.
Guinness is not Irish-owned anymore, but it doesn't matter.
It's a global brand that's made its way
all the way around the world
and a bit like the-- the diaspora,
we're all so proud of that.
I believe you own the Cashel Palace Hotel.
Is it true that the first pint of Guinness
was drawn from the well there?
Uh, so--so, legend has it. You should come and taste it,
and you'll see for yourself that it's different down there.
My name's Rory Guinness,
and I am a humble brewer from Dublin.
We've been involved with the City Centre of Dublin
since my great-great- great-great-great-grandfather
Arthur Guinness arrived from County Kildare
and signed a 9,000-year lease
on a bankrupt, derelict brewery in St. James's Gate in Dublin.
One of the biggest things that I want to do
is try Guinness, is go to the factory,
because I'm a massive-- I drink a lot of Guinness.
I want to do the tour.
It's always great to think
about who's enjoying a pint of Guinness.
Kim Kardashian, I saw the other week, was enjoying a drop.
Gwyneth Paltrow loves a glass of Guinness to steady her nerves.
Prince Albert of Monaco-- he loves a pint, too,
and he's a cousin through marriage.
He's drinking the family drink.
Absolutely. Princess Florestine, my ancestor in the 19th century,
she married the Duke of Urach of Wurttemberg.
Their great-great-grandson
married into the Guinness family.
I had forgotten about that when I had my first Guinness,
but now it takes on a very special meaning.
I am Chairman of the Iveagh Trust,
which was started by my great-great-grandfather.
The Iveagh Trust, to this day,
is one of Dublin's largest social housing providers.
Previous generations of the Guinness family
understood the importance
of space for recreation, space to meet your neighbors,
space to provide the breathing lungs
for the city.
I think of St Stephen's Green, Iveagh House,
the Iveagh Gardens, St Anne's.
- Do you hear the bells?
Those are the bells given by my great-great-grandfather
to St Patrick's Cathedral,
and they're still chiming to this day.
Rory, is Guinness good for you?
Oh, you would love that.
Guinness is good for the people of Dublin
and the Irish community around the world.
After all, Guinness is a quintessentially Irish drink.
When you're doing business with people,
and you see an Irish name, or you see a connection,
and my wife laughs at me a lot because the first question
I always ask, "Are you from Ireland?"
And they're not from Ireland at all.
They're just called Gallagher or something from many years ago.
People sometimes laugh.
We say, Irish wineries. What do you mean?
The fact that the Irish were so prominent
in the wine industry around the world.
In California were the Barrett family from Galway
or Montelena, 'cause I remember Mendoza in Argentina
sitting with the owner of a winery,
and I was asking him, "What's your name?
He said, "My name is José Luis Hernandez Murphy."
Doesn't that just sum it up?
The highest selling white wine in Ireland
is called Santa Rita 120.
refers to the 120 men with Bernardo O'Higgins
who hid in a winery as the Spaniards passed through
and then came out, regrouped and defeated the Spaniards
and got independence for Chile,
Bernardo O'Higgins traces all his origins back to Sligo.
What a story.
So, the Wild Geese--many of them went into the wine industry,
particularly in France,
particularly in the Bordeaux area,
and they became known as the "Winegeese."
Throughout Bordeaux, there's monuments,
street names, pubs that carry this Irish heritage,
Médoc is a land of immigrants.
It's not the American dream, but it's the Médoc dream.
We are now actually in the vat room
of Château Langoa and Léoville Barton,
and you can see how close it is from the Gironde Estuary,
which is very important.
It has always been very important for us
because it's really thanks to this estuary
that we have this wonderful climate and terroir,
but it's also the river that saw our first ancestor,
Thomas Barton, arrive.
And here's the river that started everything.
During the French Revolution,
the grandson went back to Ireland,
and he actually bought a farm that became very important
in our family, which is Straffen House.
It still has this feel of home in a way,
although it's not ours anymore.
It's now the famous K Club.
The K Club has Barton objects, rooms,
and, of course, a lot of Barton wines.
It's a lovely building. My father was born there.
My grandparents spent a lot of time there.
The house was purchased in 1989 by Dr. Michael Smurfit.
Loved his wines, in particular his older Bordeauxs,
which is why we have such an amazing collection
in the cellar downstairs.
I have fond memories of the K club
and of having many a fine meal there.
Lovely estate. Decided to turn it into a golf complex.
The K Club turned out to be a spectacular success.
Part of my DNA, if you will, with the Barton family.
Well, I was actually drinking Léoville Barton last night.
I only finished half a bottle of it,
so I'll finish the other half bottle tonight.
Hello, I'm Ronan Dallais, working in the Château Clarke.
I'm Irish, grew up in Dublin.
Hundreds of years ago, the Château Clarke
was owned by an Irish family.
Now the Château Clarke is currently owned
by the Rothschild family, but we are proud to keep
the name of Château Clarke and the Irish heritage.
CAZES-HACHEMIAN: The Lynch-Bages estate
has a world-renowned reputation.
For us, it's very important
to stay true to our roots, and our roots are Irish.
We say, "Lynch-Bages," but we actually should say...
Lynch-Bages.
So, it comes from the Lynch family from Galway.
They established themselves in Bordeaux in 1691.
Thomas Lynch had a number of children.
Two of them became famous in the history of the region.
Jean-Bapiste Lynch became mayor of Bordeaux,
and his son Michel became mayor of Pauillac,
which is a commonality with my family,
because my grandfather, André Cazes,
was also mayor of Pauillac for 42 years.
So my great-grandfather, Jean-Charles Cazes, was a baker.
He had the unfortunate event in his life
that his bakery burned down, so he had to reinvent himself.
He became a tenant farmer at Lynch-Bages
and he was able to acquire Château Lynch-Bages
in the late 30s, which today is a good decision,
because I would be selling bread instead of, uh,
talking to you and drinking some good wines.
A few decades ago,
my father wanted to honor the Lynch family roots.
He visited Galway and was told that there was a Mrs. Lynch
still living in a house down the street.
And he showed up unannounced at Mrs. Lynch's doorstep,
and Mrs. Lynch opened the door.
He introduced himself as Jean-Michel Cazes
from Château Lynch-Bages in Pauillac,
and she said very nicely, "I was expecting you."
So, she invited him for tea,
and the friendship started that day.
There is a real deep Irish connection with the château.
The founder of Château Phélan Ségur
back in the very early 19th century
was Bernard O'Phelan, a wine merchant,
and he purchased a small estate
thanks to the help of his father-in-law.
If you ever come to visit Phélan Ségur,
you'll be experiencing our tribute to Ireland.
We refurbished a whole room,
and now it's called the Irish Room,
and we are showing a collection of original plates
with what we call the monogram of Phélan.
On the plate, at the bottom of the monogram,
you will discover the Claddagh ring.
All Irish people who come and stay with us for lunch
and see these plates, they find the Claddagh ring.
I'm telling you, they are happy.
And the atmosphere is really an Irish atmosphere.
Another tribute to our Irish roots
is this St. Patrick's gift box that we designed.
It doesn't show a 3-leaf clover, but a 4-leaf clover,
because we need and we bring luck.
When Bernard came to France,
it was thanks to his friend, Hugh Barton.
Just incredible that years and years and years after that,
we are so close to the Barton family.
To be among these Irish families, you know,
it's something that is strong and--and very important
to our--to our heart.
Phélan Ségur is still Phélan Ségur.
Lynch-Bages is still Lynch-Bages.
For obvious reasons, it's still Langoa and Léoville Barton,
but why do you think that heritage has been respected?
Goodness me. Well, perhaps because there were names
that were recognized at the time.
Let's say Lynch-Bages would be just Bages. So what?
The "Lynch" definitely has a history to it.
Look at the way "Phélan Ségur" is written.
You have this kind of very typical French accent
on the "é."
So, I think it tells a lot about how these Irish families
really got integrated in the landscape of Bordeaux.
I think they wanted to be part of the culture of the region.
I also think it says a lot about the French,
making sure everything becomes French.
Did you know that the Irish make wine?
No.
Irish wine would be considered Guinness
and maybe a bit of whiskey.
I've never tried Irish wine.
I didn't even know there was Irish wine.
Give me some. Wow.
I haven't tried Irish wine, no, because I've never heard
of an Irish wine before.
Oh, no, never.
- Never. - Never.
- Fromage. - Fromage.
You know Château Lynch-Barge?
- Of course. - Château Phélan Ségur?
- Of course. - Château Kirwan.
- Yeah. - Château Léoville Barton.
- Yeah. - Château Clarke.
Yeah.
Are they Irish wine?
Why Irish? No.
- Where are they from? - Uh, uh, Médoc.
All of these châteaux
were set up by Irish people, so--
Yeah, but the workers-- they are French.
So, even though they were--
And the terroir is French, so it's French.
So, it's Irish inspiration,
but French terroir.
That's it.
If we ask you again,
"Have you ever tried Irish wine," what would you say?
- Yes. - Yes, very good.
What is Ireland's greatest contribution
to the world?
It's people.
Everybody seems to gel with Irish.
These are really unfair questions, Frank.
I-I-...to--to just drop on me, that's ridiculous.
Is it U2?
Not U2. The art, the plays, the literature, the paintings,
the sculpture, the music.
Our gardens and gardeners that tell a story.
Still actually a story that hasn't been told enough.
I often like to say that I was the one who started
the rewilding movement in Ireland,
but in reality, I was about a hundred years later.
William Robinson was
the first person to create the concept
of "The Wild Garden."
Although a lot of it was popularized in the UK,
it has Irish roots.
We Irish can make a case for having produced
the greatest poet In William Butler Yeats,
the greatest novelist in James Joyce,
and the greatest dramatist in Seán O'Casey or Samuel Beckett.
Love Samuel Beckett. Our son Paris--Paris Beckett--
he's named after Samuel.
Keely wanted to call Paris, Paris.
I think it's a magnificent name.
I said, that's a very powerful name for a boy.
So, I think it has to have a little something else,
and Beckett I love, so Paris Beckett Brosnan.
We have Bram Stoker, created "Dracula."
You have my own great-grandfather who was
one of the pioneers of the fantasy literature--
Lord Dunsany, influenced Tolkien,
had five plays on Broadway consecutively.
Not even Shakespeare had that.
Ireland is a small island, really,
on the periphery of northern Europe,
but we are united by a common bond,
which is a pride of who we are.
Because no matter where you go in the world,
whether it be in the world of literature
or the world of music or the world of sport,
we have made an impact at every level,
despite our smallness.
We've always punched above our weight
as a small nation, haven't we?
You know, a 21-year-old son of a Syrian migrant
created a company, Apple, and it started at zero.
I mean, Ryanair here in Ireland set off in 1985,
flew from Waterford with 18 passengers in one plane.
So, I love that notion. Nobody started a large organization.
Tony O'Reilly was just one of the world's great communicators.
He was under pressure launching Kerrygold,
which was the name he came up with,
to call it Leprechaun Butter.
And, I mean, that would have been such a disaster.
Tony O'Reilly, Michael Smurfit, and Tony Ryan
were the Three Musketeers
who were doing this stuff internationally
when there weren't Irish players on the world stage.
We all owe them a debt of gratitude for that,
because they did it at a time,
to use Myles na Gopaleen's expression,
when it was neither popular or not profitable,
but they made it both.
Tony O'Reilly saying he succeeded despite being Irish,
whereas now, people succeed because they're Irish.
Very, very proud of this.
Jefferson Smurfit Corporation
was the largest, fastest growing company in America.
Yeah, that's fantastic.
Look where Apple is.
$3 trillion company now.
Yeah, so Jefferson Smurfit-- number one. Apple 13.
Wow. That's incredible.
Slight change of results since then.
Well, they're both Irish companies.
That's Her Majesty The Queen giving me the knighthood.
Ireland doesn't have awards and doesn't give awards.
The only thing you can get in Ireland
is an honorary doctorate.
Therefore, it didn't seem right to me
that when I was knighted by Her Majesty The Queen,
to use a title in Ireland,
where Ireland didn't honor titles.
Although this is a republic now,
and I'm often referred to as Lord Dunsany,
in reality, as a republic,
I always introduce myself as Randal Plunkett.
I allow other people, usually Americans,
to call me Lord Dunsany.
I was born in England, grew up in Ireland,
so I was moving quite a lot as a young man,
and I remember the war years very well
and my father being in the army, marching past that gate
in St Helens in Lancashire, where I grew up.
He was a big man to begin with. He was over 6 feet.
My mother was very small. My mother was just over 5 feet.
They used to talk about the weather down here
and the weather up there.
They had eight children, which I was the eldest.
We had a farm in Cleadon village near Sunderland.
My father coined the expression,
"You buy brains, and you make businessmen."
And he decided at age 16,
myself and my late brother Jeff pulled out of Clongowes Wood,
went straight to the factory floor and worked our way up.
And I learned at a very young age how takeovers worked
and how balance sheets worked.
So, when my term came to be to be running the business,
I knew where the goalposts were,
and I knew how to get the ball over the line.
All these things come running back when I talk to you.
Well, having nationalized the Irish industry,
the government announced
that they're entering into an agreement with the UK,
and in 10 years, we're going to be equal tariffs.
Ireland made its own shoes in those days.
It made its own shirts and all these sort of things.
They're all going to go by the wayside.
We were going to be decimated.
Our customer base was going to be decimated.
So, I got the blessing from my father to diversify
the company into the UK first
and then eventually into America,
without which we wouldn't have been where we are today
if we hadn't done that.
In Smurfit, I set out to be
the best producer of corrugated boxes
in the United Kingdom. That was my goal.
We became the best, and because we were the best,
we became the biggest.
One day I was in Los Angeles,
and one young analyst there asked me,
"Have you ever thought about buying
Container Corporation of America from Mobil Oil?"
I was on a plane the next day to New York,
and I tell you, never looked back since then.
It was the greatest deal I ever did.
That was the foundation of the family fortune.
I gambled the company twice in my life,
and that was probably once too many.
In my day, nobody thought of an Irish multinational.
We were the first.
You're having some fun now.
Is Michael Smurfit right
in saying that Smurfit was the first?
Yes, he is, in the 20th century.
We have been doing this since 1759,
so I would argue Guinness is the first Irish multinational.
I was never one to scream from the rooftops
about what we gave as a family or as a company.
When they put my name over the business school,
for example, I was horrified initially.
True giving is about 'cause you genuinely believe
that you have to give back to society what is given to you.
And we got a great deal from Ireland,
and we should give something back to it.
I was asked by the Rotunda Hospital
to come to visit one day,
and I came into this room, and I said, "What's this?"
This is incubators.
And they said they're going to lose
about four or five babies that month
because they didn't have enough incubators.
I said, "You're joking me."
I said, "You get on a plane, go to America,
buy four incubators and bring them in, whatever it costs."
I couldn't sleep that night
just thinking of that simple thing like that.
My second son, when he was born,
was born four months premature, was a blue baby.
He got the last rites. He was going to die,
and he survived because of the incubator.
I went back a couple of years later.
I was invited for some ceremony,
and there was my name up in the...
in the-- on the plaque on the wall.
I didn't want that. The last thing I wanted.
What do you consider
your greatest achievement?
That's a very simple one to answer.
Seeing the Irish flag flying in my factories around the world,
it was always something I insisted upon--
the country flag, the Irish flag,
and the company flag, three masts in every factory.
Great pride in seeing that.
There's a close relationship between Monaco and Ireland,
because of the history of the Kelly family.
And, of course, I'm a very close friend of the prince.
Give him my best wishes when you see him.
Michael Smurfit is a great friend of the family.
It's not only because, of course,
of his consular duties here in Monaco, but he helped
with the Princess Grace Irish Library,
with Princess Grace Foundation, with my foundation also,
And of course, he's a great entrepreneur.
Love having conversations with him
about his take on things.
I noticed that you have something
interesting on your lapel there.
Well, yeah, I wore that just for you for today,
but I do wear it for St Patrick's
and for other Irish momentous occasions.
And then, of course, a shamrock tie.
As you can see, I've got my green Ralph Lauren...
- ...jacket on.
My wife bought me this, and I'd never really worn it.
Maybe I had one outing.
Through my mother's family,
through the Kellys of County Mayo
and the ancestral home in Drumilra,
we knew that the Irish connection
was very solid.
Princess Grace's grandfather, John Henry Kelly,
was born in Ireland in County Mayo in 1847,
and at only 20 years old, he emigrated.
As for all Irish immigrants to any country,
but mostly to the United States, it was extremely difficult.
My grandfather, yes, he was a great entrepreneur,
and yes, he was dedicated as a leader,
as a political figure in Philadelphia,
and also the tremendous career
that my grandfather had at rowing
is still looked upon with incredible awe.
Not only a 2-time Olympian,
but a triple gold medalist in the single and double sculls.
It's uncanny that next year the Olympics will be in Paris.
I will invite my Kelly cousins over,
and we will all be able to watch the double sculls final.
So, that'll be a great way to celebrate
the 100th anniversary of that third and final gold medal.
The 1961 visit by Prince Rainier and Princess Grace was historic
because it was the first ever visit by any head of state
to Ireland since the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922.
So, it really put Ireland on the map.
It was very apparent that she was thrilled
to reconnect and to introduce my father and her family
to her Irish roots, and when I go to Ireland,
some people still remember that fondly and with great detail.
There weren't that many heads of state
that went to Ireland in those days.
I'm still amazed to know that it had such an impact
on everyone's lives.
Did she instill in you
the sense of the importance of Irishness?
We knew that she had a passion
for everything of Irish culture.
She would go out of her way and take time
to explain these things to us.
What she would be very proud of is setting up
the Princess Grace Irish Library.
It's a wonderful way to celebrate my mother's legacy,
and I think she'd be very proud of that.
The value of a library here that showcases Irish culture.
Our treasure is "Ulysses," first edition copy.
That's a copy that I'd like to finish someday.
I've tried to go through "Ulysses."
It's a bit tough to get through in one go,
so...
Uh, maybe when I have more time,
I will be able to go through that quietly
and peacefully to get the full gist of it.
We say in Ireland,
it's the book we pretend the most that we've read.
The other thing we discovered researching
your Irish heritage, is that the first photo
of your parents meeting here in the palace...
Mm-hmm.
...was taken by an Irish photographer
from Dublin, Edward Quinn.
- Yes, Mm-hmm. - Ted Quinn.
Um, he had been the unit photographer
on "To Catch a Thief," so... - Exactly, yeah.
...Princess Grace and him had a...
- Yeah. - ...close rapport, so she's--
she's very relaxed. - Yeah.
So, it's amazing to think there was an Irishman capturing...
- I know. - ...a historic moment
in the Grimaldi family history.
No, and we were able to purchase his photographic collection.
He was a really great photographer.
The secret to a good Irish coffee
is to know what an Irish coffee is. Right?
When I go somewhere, and I order an Irish coffee
and it comes out looking like a latte,
I think I'm--I shouldn't have ordered that.
You don't want the cream to sink.
And a lot of people have a lot of theories
about the back of the spoon, the top of the spoon.
Balance of sugar.
The trick is very, very hot coffee...
Good quality Irish whiskey.
...and very, very cold cream.
And then you just need the top of cream that's not overwhipped
so it looks like a Guinness.
What do you think
is the secret of a great Irish coffee?
Bushmills Whiskey.
Pre-20th century, Irish whiskey was possibly
the most important whiskey in the world,
and I'm sure that the Scottish people
might, um, might-- might lynch me for that.
But we were. We were more important than Scotch.
We were better quality than scotch.
We were drank mostly in the States and the UK,
our two biggest markets.
Riding high--Irish whiskey.
A couple of global events and national events happened.
So, first of all, we had the War of Independence
here in the 1920s.
Our biggest market, the UK, was now closed off.
Secondly, our second biggest market,
the U.S., went through 13 years of Prohibition,
where we know it was illegal
both to make, sell, and drink alcohol.
After Prohibition, we then had the Second World War.
So, pre-20th century,
we had roughly about 75 distilleries on this island.
Post World War II, we had three.
We see it that we're all an Irish family,
and we want to be number one again.
We want our title back from the Scotch
and everybody else that's out there.
But Bushmills is one of the first to make whiskey,
and for us, that's a very important thing to say,
that in Ireland, we've been making whiskey
a lot longer than the Scotch counterparts.
So, the wonderful water here at Bushmills
is something we're very passionate about,
and why we believe Bushmills has that distinct character.
So, our water flows through the same limestone
and basalt rock at the Giant's Causeway.
It's a tributary of the River Bush,
and it's said to have been blessed many, many years ago
by St. Columba, one of Ireland's 12 apostles,
as the purest form of water in Ireland.
So, the best bit about my job
is that I get to taste whiskey every day and call it my job.
I get to open casks
that haven't been touched for many, many years
and be the first to taste that whiskey.
It really is a dream come true to be a master blender
and be part of the legacy of Bushmills.
I always like to think,
if you're trying a whiskey for the first time,
you should sit down in a lovely, quiet room,
close the curtains, and don't tell anybody else
you have the bottle.
Let it tell you its story.
Let the sip of each time you take it
reveal something new to you.
That little hint of marzipan there.
This one's almost like Christmas cake in a glass.
I always think of my grandmother when I'm drinking this one
and those lovely fruitcakes
that she used to make growing up.
Ricky has explained the rules of Gaelic and stuff to me.
I would never play that.
That's a very dangerous sport.
If you had a good hurling stick and you wanted to keep it,
you'd have to, you know, you get a crack in it.
So, you get the little bit of metal would be around the turf.
You'd nail that in.
Of course, that'd slice your head off.
That's a grand hurling stick. There you go now.
Look at that. Oh, yeah. I used to love kind of running down
and...
Trying to break a window or something like that.
Find an old building.
The GAA is one of the most impressive
amateur sporting organizations in the world.
My granduncle and grandfather, John and Jerome Mannion,
played in the first all-Ireland hurling final.
Back in the day, in the 19th century,
they came up with the idea of using whiskey corks
as the interior of a sliotar ball.
Sliotar. The Sliotar. Yeah, there you go.
This was to make them less leaden and heavy when it rained.
This eureka moment came to them having a drink of whiskey
after a particularly rainy hurling match.
So, there is actually a connection
between Irish whiskey and the GAA.
The GAA was founded in 1884,
and it has given us a sense of pride,
a sense of belonging, that no matter where we are,
that rivalry between club
and county is intense.
For an hour on one Sunday or one Saturday,
we might go hammer and tongs against each other.
But at the end of the day,
you put your arm around that person,
and you say you're a family.
That's the GAA.
You don't get transferred anywhere.
You stay where you are.
This is your home.
This is where you live and breathe,
build all your memories.
And this is your county, because Ireland,
some people might not know, is divided into 32 counties.
My parents are both Waterford-born and bred.
My mother was very-- actually, both of my parents,
very proud of their Waterford background,
and that's a form of tribalism.
But then you have the GAA, which, in my view,
is one of the greatest organizations
of the 20th and 21st centuries, an organization that's managed
to develop a code of sport that only exists in one country.
And that means that our county identities are so vital to us.
So, I'm a Waterford fan, and I'll always be,
and I'll always feel particular affection for
and devotion to all things Waterford.
You can't leave your county behind.
Your county's always in you, no matter what parts
of the country or the world you're in.
You see it on our small island,
just the differences, north and south,
even in the north, within the north.
I always think that the border is not between north and south,
but it's within the communities in Ireland.
I think we are quite tribal.
I think we have a strong sense of community,
neighbors and the squinting windows
and all that kind of stuff,
everything from language to sports to food
distinguished the characteristics
of those different tribes.
Frankly, long may it continue.
I'd hate to think of it as just one, you know, um,
amorphous kind of blob.
Mr. President, 25 years ago,
a different band of dreamers and realists, men and women,
peacemakers and idealists,
came together to make a new promise
to a new generation of people on this island.
It was the promise of peace,
of a future free from violence and the fear of violence.
When I grew up through 30 years of violence on this island,
saw a lot of things I wouldn't like anybody else to see.
I think there's a very strong chance that some form
of agreed Ireland could emerge over the next couple of decades.
I think we've got to be very careful
how we move forward on this.
I find it disappointing that the last 25 years of peace
haven't made more progress towards greater understanding
on the island of Ireland,
and there's still very deep divisions,
but I do recognize that we are
at an inflection point, as Joe Biden often says,
where things in the future may be very different
from the way they are now.
I mean, frankly, my main concern with United Ireland
is less about the economic
and more about the societal side of things.
Look, you know, I'm very proud to be Irish,
but we can't have a situation where
one group forces another group into United Ireland.
I don't think it'll ever come by force.
I don't think it can and nor should it.
When we were children, Dad brought us to every county,
north and south,
and my mum is from Omeath in County Louth,
which is right on the border.
It was in the middle of the Troubles,
and we heard across the way what was going on in Newry
and in the north and in County Down,
you could hear what was happening.
I would vote for a United Ireland.
I would. I'd like to see it.
I'm looking forward to the future we all share.
There's so much cultural significance
to Northern Ireland.
There's so much history and rich culture,
that it would be really lovely to see United Ireland.
But I don't think our opinion is as important
in this debate as, like, someone living
in Northern Ireland at the moment.
I think they're really in the hotspot.
It's really them who need to be looked after.
If, in a referendum,
a United Ireland was voted for by a majority,
would you accept that?
You can see it c-- And what do you think
the community here, you know, would think about it?
We've just come up from the south amazed to see
so many Union Jack flags promoting one view.
Does that surprise you, or do you just take it for granted?
I'm not surprised, but I am disappointed.
It doesn't represent me.
And even though I might have been
from a very loyalist place geographically, growing up,
these flags excludes others that I don't want excluded.
Wallace is, you know, your maiden name?
Maiden name, yes.
- O'Neill is you-- - Is my married name.
Does that seem like a cross-border divide?
It was when we got...
Yes, it was when we got married. Yeah. Yes.
We're marr-- uh, 2005, we got married.
We started dating in 2000,
you know, two years after the Good Friday Agreement.
So... but even two years after the Good Friday Agreement, yeah,
there was still definitely, for sure.
So, Sophia, would you vote for United Ireland?
Uh, I think I would.
I think it's easy enough for us to say, yeah,
we would want that and, yeah, we would want
to be united, and we would want to be one state,
but obviously there's people here that wouldn't want that.
It's not gonna be straightforward,
and I'm sure there's lots of people
who would--who would fear it, probably.
And, yes, the violence, I suppose, is something
we would be worried about.
We don't want to go back down that path again.
Once it comes up, and there is a lot of chat and talk about,
at the time, whenever it comes to a referendum,
if it does happen, then it will--
I think there's... there's certainly...
the very high potential for trouble or... issues,
as you say, Northern Irish-based issues
that we're all very well aware of.
So, I suppose making Ireland better known for is
places such as this, as opposed to the violence
and the troubles that have hopefully seen the last of.
Time will tell, I suppose.
I often see within a teenage setting
that there's potential for them to have
very extreme polar views.
But there are a large growing amount of peoples
from different sides of the community
consciously deciding to be educated
in an atmosphere of tolerance and respect.
For me, it's live and let live. You get on with your life,
you do your best for your family, for your children.
You know, it just-- it spans generations.
And until that finishes, I don't think we'll get very far.
This island is for everyone.
Northern Ireland is for everyone.
Times are changin', and I think a lot of people
wanna just get on and move on with the future.
These are typically Irish language, Gaelic names.
Uh-huh.
Could you see if you can try and pronounce...
- Okay. - ...any of these--the top...
Wow.
Just trying to ask you, how you pronounce it?
Ah.
No, that's not fair, guys.
That's not fair at all.
Oh, good heavens. [laughs] Oh.
Oh, my God. This--I'm the--
I'm the wrong Irishman to bring this to.
Okay, I'm gonna try.
Ai-ofee?
- Auf-fee? - Oaf-fee?
A-fee? Auf-fee?
- Wuff? -[laughs] No.
A-wuff?
Ao-fee?
No, it's not ao-fee.
Ee-fah.
Dare-buh.
- Deir-bruha? - It's Deir-bruha?
Dervla.
Deir-blah?
Deer-blah?
Derv-lah.
Pay-drag.
Pa-dreg.
Pa-dring?
Par-rig. Par-rig.
She-bahn.
Shu-ban?
Shu-ban.
Shi-vahn.
And... Say-orze?
Syource?
Soar-cee.
Seer-saw.
I don't know.
Ser-sha. Ser-sha. Ser-sha.
- May. - May.
- Yeah, I got one? Yes! - That's right?
And a few, I came close. Yeah, it's...
It takes a lot of imagination, though.
Well done. I'm impressed that you did...
- Cheers. Frank is much easier.
You were sensible enough
to give your firstborn son a pronounceable Irish name.
- What did you choose? - Sean. Sean.
Yes.
This is a very sensible name.
I remember the morning we named him very well.
We were an Acapulco.
Anyway, that's another story.
You have to help me with the Gaelic expression,
"100,000 welcomes." What's it?
- Céad Míle Fáilte. - Céad Míle Fáilte.
Bob Geldof said that the English
never understood the Irish.
Do you think that?
Um... Maybe the language. Possibly.
So, in the great void of the Famine,
uh, this is cliché for all Irish people. Sorry.
But, um, in the great void that was left,
a set of artists had to invent a sense of ourselves.
They had to take the language hostage
that they were given and wrestle with it
and make it their own, which they very successfully did.
We always talk about this, that we're really happy
that our first feature film
was in our mother tongue, in the Irish language.
And there's a lovely saying, isn't there?
An old Irish saying, "Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam,"
which means,
"A country without a language is a country without a soul."
And we're so lucky that we have our own indigenous language
here in Ireland and that it's--it's spoken.
And hopefully it's experiencing somewhat of a revival,
you know, of late, so...
I can't even say it in the pa-- Is fuath liom an Ghaeilge.
Like, that means, "I hate Irish," doesn't it?
But I don't hate Irish. I love Irish.
I hated Irish--I hated Irish in school, like, so badly.
You can't go to the toilet unless you can say it
in the lang--like, like, so it was...
or if you had to get lines, and I always had to do lines.
You'd have to write the lines in Irish.
So, I just, like, associated it with, like, pun--
like, punishment.
The great thing about Irish
is everyone becomes very fluent in Irish
when they go on holidays, and they want to talk about
the English-speaking people on the beach beside them.
And suddenly we're all able
to put a couple of sentences in Irish together.
As a man who loves to complain about things,
to complain in Irish would have its own joys.
An bhfuil cead agam dul go dtí an leithreas?
which, if you don't know, is,
"Can I go to the toilet, please?"
And every Irish person remembers--
if they remember nothing, they remember that because
they had to use it in school if they needed to go for a wee.
So... An bhfuil cead agam dul go dtí an leithreas?
And if you say it like that, it sounds very grand,
but it's not at all.
The main one being "sláinte,"
it's used, I think, on many an occasion
When I go to Ireland, it's several times a day.
Wasn't it an incredible act of destruction
to prohibit people speaking their language,
to change all the names of their terrain and their ecology?
Punish children if they use the language,
and the nonsense of suggesting that there is
something subversive about using a language
that was used by all of us. It is just so objectionable.
It was associated with the mind of empire.
We're not out of it.
The cúpla focal isn't good enough anymore.
My mother May is still alive. We speak every day.
May is 91.
There was time lost,
you know, at the beginning of our lives together.
She was 19, 20 when she had me.
It's very young. Very young.
We'd had so many years of separation
and hellos and goodbyes.
So, we--we--we've made up a lot of life over the years.
Thank God for her that she had the courage to set sail and...
"The hell with the lot of you.
I'm gonna make a life for my son and myself."
The success that I've had has been shared with her,
and she comes on the set with me from time to time.
I try to find movies in that neck of the woods
just so I can continue that... that kinship.
My mother May is a strong, strong lady,
philosophical, Irish. The Irish mammy.
What is a typical Irish mammy?
Very protective and, um...
loving and... kind of...
It's a slightly negative connotation as well.
- Yeah. - Isn't there?
There's this sense of, like, an over-mothering, perhaps.
You're not overprotective. He's just--
- He's just always made sure... - Like a mammy.
...I'm al--
You're asking me, is an Irish mammy a thing?
I am such an Irish mammy.
Yes, an Irish mammy is completely a thing.
She never stops being an Irish mammy.
Every Irish mammy wakes up every morning,
and she wants her babies all around her.
That's an Irish mammy for you.
What is an Irish mammy anymore look like?
If it means loads of good cooking, I-I know
I'm not an Irish mammy. Not a great one.
What I love is that wherever you are in the world,
the minute you hear a flicker of an Irish accent,
it's like moths to a flame, and all of a sudden you realize
that you either went to the same school together
or you're somehow related.
That's the lovely thing that I love about being Irish.
It's everywhere.
On my mom's side, a Brown is in our family line, so I have,
I think, 13 or 18% Irish.
My father's French. He's from Paris,
and my mother is Irish.
Is there a dilemma watching Ireland and France--
No, there's no dilemma. We're always for the greens.
We like saying we have the double nationality--
French and Irish.
Everybody's very surprised and happy
and interested to know why.
Look at my name-- Rory and Guinness.
You don't get much more Irish than that.
I'm an American citizen,
but my soul is Irish.
The spirit of me is Irish.
I-I can certainly feel it in my bones and my blood,
being Irish,
what that means, our ancestors,
the religion, of course.
The religion plays such a strong part of it.
I like the God I pray to,
the one that I've created for myself
and the prayers that I've remembered.
But I have my own-- my own words with him
on a daily basis of-- always with gratitude, I think,
just for this day and all the days of my life.
You know, it's such a mystery.
There's no doubt that any Irish person
never really loses their Irishness.
You know, I have a lot of, uh, family in America
that have been there for over 30 years,
and they've become even more Irish.
You're much more aware of your Irishness
sometimes, I think, when you live abroad.
Well, I'm a very proud Irishwoman, first of all.
I'm also a very proud Ulster woman.
It all adds to the complexities of all of our histories,
because it's only when you start to look back
that it's not quite as simple as we all thought.
We are ourselves not British. We are Norman,
so it's normally French bastard, not English bastard.
We've always been different than many
of the other titled folk.
We've embraced being Irish.
I've often asked,
"If you were only allowed one passport, which would you keep?"
I said, in a heartbeat,
I get rid of my British passport,
even if it meant taking away the title. So what?
We have Irish passports. We're Irish.
I'm Irish. Regardless of whether it be the north or the south.
To be Irish is now something
as diverse as the way we talk, the number of games we play.
It's something that's so inclusive,
and I see the new Irish and the people who were
born outside this state, who now live in this state,
and they're proud to be Irish.
I've been away from Ireland longer than I lived in Ireland.
When I first started going back in the early 2000s,
what really struck me was the development,
and now when you go back, that diversity,
you know, it's beautiful to see.
We're a very international family
and a very international people.
Irishness, and we're now learning this, by the way,
more and more, it cannot be confined
to a stereotype of people who look and sound like me.
So, I remember trying to speak about racism.
Um, like, like, as a child, you know, as a young woman,
you would just be met with, like, a wall of anger
and, like, just, like, such, such defensiveness.
For me, it's really interesting that now in Ireland,
there's a thirst to have those conversations.
It's a story that we've made a lot of effort
to reflect Ireland as it is today.
The immigration system that exists in our name
is currently in contrast
to the Ireland of a thousand welcomes that we're so used to.
So, I am Irish and Nigerian.
My mum's Irish. My dad's Nigerian.
I was born in Dublin, um, at a time where Black people,
anybody who wasn't white, anybody that was, like,
in any way different, was extremely rare--
a very different Ireland to the Ireland of today.
Then there was me in the midst of all that.
There were so many people who'd, like,
never seen a person who wasn't white before.
I know that because they told me.
I know that because literally,
people would, like, cross the--the street
to, like, look at me, to, like, touch my hair,
and then share with me
that they'd--they'd never met a Black person before.
Um, so I was, like, the first Black person
that a lot of people met, and that was, um, I guess,
for--for most of those people, this is their first time.
But this was something that kind of, like, determined,
um, my everyday existence,
so it was quite-- it was quite exhausting.
And then there was just--
there was the constant, um... refrain,
the constant reiteration that I wasn't--
that I wasn't really Irish,
um, which was difficult because I wasn't from anywhere else.
You know, I didn't have-- like, my dad's from Nigeria,
but I was born and raised in Ireland.
So, I didn't--
Often when I spoke, people-- and I had a Dublin accent,
people would be really shocked, and they'd be like,
"Oh, I thought you'd be American.
I thought you'd be Jamaican,
I thought you'd be, like, anything, um, but Irish."
And... I feel it was also, like, my claims to Irishness
that, um, provoked quite hostile responses from people, um,
because certainly at that time, to be Irish meant to be white.
It was all just like, a lot, you know, for people to...
for people to process.
And then when I finished school,
I just wanted to be somewhere where I wasn't the Black girl.
I felt really angry towards Ireland.
In my mind, I was like, I used to be Irish.
It's quite interesting, though. Around the time I left
is around the time, um, Ireland--actually, it was
pretty much, like, maps perfectly onto each other,
is around the time Ireland
actually started to become more--more diverse.
So, just as I was leaving,
people from other parts of the world,
you know, were moving there.
So, there is now this whole population of people
who are Irish who aren't white.
And it feels far more ordinary now
than it did when I was a child.
When people ask me how I've managed to, like, hang on
to my Irish identity, it's like,
I don't think it's something I could lose,
because I feel it's, like, such a core--
it's such a core part of me.
I'm not, like, desperate to be Irish. I just am Irish.
No, you're not. And then living here,
I really came to understand
my, like, worldview was very Irish,
and I saw, like, the really big cultural gap, distance,
gulf between me and, like, everyone I was meeting.
I feel like over the years I've been rehabilitating,
like, my relationship with Ireland,
that realization of how Irish I am.
In Ireland, there's like a surrealist, anarchic spirit.
Oh, why am I attracted here?
The land, the sea.
It's the attitude of the people, the anarchic quality.
I have never sat down and listed what it is that makes me happy.
When I go west of Skibbereen to where I live,
I'm honored that I've been accepted--a bastard Englishman.
I don't know. I always feel home is where the heart is.
When I'm here, my heart is here.
I love, uh, Ireland. I love this country.
I love the food, the people, the beers, everything.
- The weather? - The weather, too.
Yeah. Of course.
It is a great advantage
that so many people feel so positively towards Ireland.
It's the reputation, uh, that we have to protect.
The essence of Ireland is as a real contributor
and through a general desire to be a good global citizen
in a changing, challenging,
and, in some cases, rather dangerous world today.
What's amazing about Ireland
is that we were once the downtrodden,
and now we are not.
Ireland has become a wealthy country.
We weren't always.
So, this idea of us kind of suddenly forgetting
or not being interested in those who have less than us
shouldn't be in the Irish vocabulary,
shouldn't be in the mindset,
because we were once those people.
What the Americans always often talk about,
about the American dream--
the American dream is the Irish dream.
That's what--what the Irish dream really is.
They just stole the idea.
Your story is the American dream,
but is it really the Irish dream?
Well, it's my dream, so...
You know, a man becomes what he dreams.
He travels far to find out who he is.
This country's been good to me.
Ireland's been good to me. England's been good to me.
I'm made up of all of these ingredients
of culture and friendship and people and work.
Work.
It's powerful if you can live creative life, artistic life,
and make sense of it and make money at doing it.
You know, uh, make a life for your family.
Anyway, that's enough about me. How was I in the second act?
If you kiss the Blarney Stone,
you're bestowed with a gift of eloquence.
Do you know, I've never kissed the Blarney Stone?
I must do that. Might shut me up for once and for all.
I have a bit of a fear of heights, and I do believe
you have to go all the way back and put your--
No, not for me. Not for me.
Do you think begrudgery
is part of the Irish psyche?
Ah, look, I think we probably invented it.
There's nothing good about being second in life.
Rather be number one.
Have you been out to Jamaica to GoldenEye,
owned by Chris Blackwell? - I did, yes.
Keely and I went out there
when our little boy Dylan was a babby.
Oh.
I remember Kate Moss was there and Naomi Campbell...
...was sitting, and Keely, bless her heart,
she was breastfeeding at the time--little baby boy.
But sitting there with Naomi Campbell
and Kate Moss, and they're topless.
"Oh, look at the baby. He's lovely. He's lovely"
while she's trying to nur-- he's trying to nurse.
"No, no, no, no. That's Mum."
Usain, I think you helped Ricky
get his honorary doctorate.
Dr. Simms.
- See? - You got yours first.
Exactly. That's what I'm saying.
I helped him to get his doctorate.
- I only got my-- - Yeah, I helped him.
If it wasn't for him, I would never have gotten it.
So--so, you're welcome.
- It's helped me a lot, actually.
- I've done a lot of surgeries.
Got a little fly here, which is...
It's electric?
There's always potatoes.
There's always, um, Ballymaloe Relish.
I really love Irish chocolate.
I think Irish chocolate tastes different
than any chocolate anywhere else in the world.
But, yeah, I get little food hampers.
I get them sent, definitely. They keep me going.
We asked, "Who's the greatest Irishman?"
And the overwhelming majority say you, so...
Well, that's a nice way to end the interview.
Can I just--Can I just say, they cannot be more wrong?
And as I pointed out, the sense of the absurd and the Irish,
that's--that's exactly the perfect example.
- But thank you. - Sorry, Bob. Um...
Is there any way you could actually
show us an Irish goodbye
for those who don't actually know what an Irish goodbye is?
Would you be able to demonstrate an Irish goodbye to us?
Just run off.
Is it? It is.
Do a runner. Come on.
What is an Irish goodbye?
Okay, so I never heard of this until I was in America.
And since I've started hearing it,
since I started hearing it in America,
I'm hearing it all the time, like,
oh, I did an Irish goodbye.
It's leaving without saying goodbye to people.
But I literally never heard it until a year ago.
Is it a new thing? Was it always a thing?
Is it an American thing?
An Irish goodbye. I'm quite well known for that.
Like, a Irish goodbye right now, actually.
Run out of things to say.
I think that's probably a good idea, Frank.
I was trying to think. I think I've made almost every move.
Don't get hurt, man. We need you.
You okay? All right.
I'll tell you what happened to me in America once
after I spoke at an event. This guy came up to me.
He said, "Gee," said, "I learned something tonight.
He said, "Never give a Mick a mic."