I certainly notice the vitality in Belfast, which wasn't there in the Seventies. There was a war going on then. Now there are cranes everywhere. There really is a sense of renewal and hope.
My dad moved to London in his early 20s and didn't really go back. So the irony is I've spent lots and lots of time in Ireland, but not with my dad. I've shot films in Belfast, where he's from. And I've shot in Dun Laoghaire. Which is great. And I've shot in Dublin.
Belfast is a city which, while not forgetting its past, is living comfortably with its present and looking forward to its future.
I went back to Belfast and started a club, the Maritime. No one had thought about doing a blues club, so I was the first.
We'll be launching the new public prosecution service in Northern Ireland tomorrow. I'll be doing it in Belfast tomorrow. This is an entirely new era, in which criminal justice now exercised on an equal basis, not the old basis in which community division was a feature.
Belfast during the Troubles looked like a different world.
When I play discos in Belfast or freshers' week in Oxford, there are 1,800 kids dressed as me. It's odd, it's funny, and it pays really well.
When we went to Belfast we saw some beautiful countryside and coastlines.
When I was growing up, Belfast City Hall was surrounded by security, and we had no access to it. But now, people come in and out of it all the time. On a nice day, office workers and students sit on the lawn outside and have lunch. It's great to see how Northern Ireland has changed. To be part of that is fantastic.
He came to the States in 1963, I think with a view to making up with my mother, but that didn't work. He came for three weeks, and drank his way all over Brooklyn. And went back... I went to his funeral in Belfast.