I’m not a nostalgic freak. Things always change and we’re caught in the pincer jaws of change, especially right now […] But for the Irish some things are consistent wherever you meet them. They want to know where you’re from. They want to know the town, then the town land, then the lane or street. It’s not what class you’re from, it’s where about you’re from. The sense of place seems particularly pronounced in the Irish psyche. And I think that’s what the stray sod is — a kind of tipping into a new field you don’t know […] There’s no long-term thinking or planning in Ireland. There’s a lack of rigor […] How many times in your life have you heard someone say, ‘Ah, sure it’s only a bit of craic.’ I remember a friend saying to me, when I’d had a novel I’d spent three years on rejected, ‘Ah, sure what odds, it’s only a bit of craic at the end of the day.’ I thought, this is the problem, we don’t take ourselves seriously enough. We have half a million unemployed and it will be fucking grand in my eyeball if something isn’t done soon. We could be doing now with a leader who’s a combination of W.B. Yeats and Sean Lemass. It’s a turning point now for the Republic. It’s an element of the title of the book too. The stray sod looks the same, it feels the same but it is not the same. It hit the society bang on time again.

— Patrick McCabe