Fenian scum! Get back to your rat holes and paedophile priests.
- Protestants shouting abuse at Catholic parents and primary schoolchildren in the Ardoyne area of Belfast
I'm totally disgusted. I'm ashamed to call myself a loyalist.
- Loyalist politician Billy Hutchinson after a blast bomb was thrown at the parents and children
Is the next demand that they must only use the back door of their houses? Is the next demand that they must sit at the back of the bus?
- Leading Sinn Fein activist Gerry Kelly, rejecting suggestions by the Protestant residents that the Catholic children enter their school by a rear door
Nobody can understand what is going on here. You and I can't understand it and the watching world looks on with disbelief.
- Jane Kennedy, junior minister at the Northern Ireland Office
I can't believe that I won't see my baby again.
- Christine O'Sullivan, whose six- year-old daughter, Deirdre, was murdered by her father, Christopher Crowley, who then took his own life
I think if this case had been taken more seriously right from the beginning by the gardai, they would have got the child back.
- MEP Mary Banotti, a campaigner on behalf of parents of abducted children
Mary Banotti MEP
What he did last Thursday he did out of love and nothing else
- Angela Crowley, sister of Christopher, defending his reputation on the day of his funeral
Children are nowhere as safe as in the company of their natural fathers.
- Irish Times columnist John Waters commenting on the case
They regarded Thatcherism as a Napoleonic code, from which every deviation must be punished with the kind of arrogant terror they inflicted on [John] Major. They were plus Thatcheriste que Thatcher - until they were outdone by the lady herself as she scorned every successor, sent down the writs of rage, kept her court of fawners, fulminated against the real world, and sustained the notion that Conservatism might still consist of her, and her alone.
- Political commentator Hugo Young on how Lady Thatcher's political offspring have made the British Tories unelectable
I voted for the fat guy . . . I scanned the foam on our Sardinian beach . . . Am I right? I cried. Yes yes yesssss, said the sea. Who should it be? I asked. Clarke Clarke Clarke, called the gulls.
- Political commentator and Tory MP for Henley, Boris Johnson, on how he came to vote for Kenneth Clarke
It is not about Irish per se, it is about the rights of parents to decide what their children should learn or not learn. - Tom Higgins on his battle with a Blessington, Co Wicklow, primary school that has expelled his children because they refuse to learn Irish