Marie Kean, actress of stage and screen whose career spanned over 40 years, is born in the village of Rush, County Dublin on June 27, 1918. The Stage calls her one of Ireland’s most impressive actresses, and “an artist of considerable emotional depth and theatrical command.”
Kean grows up in Rush and is educated at Loreto College, North Great George’s Street, Dublin. She learns her craft at the Gaiety School of Acting and is part of the Abbey Theatre company until 1961.
Kean’s leading role as the kindly matriarch, Mrs. Kennedy, in the RTÉ Radio serial drama, The Kennedys of Castleross, makes her famous throughout Ireland. She stars in the programme for the duration of its 18-year run.
In 1968, Kean wins a Jacob’s Award for her performance as Winnie in RTÉ television’s production of Samuel Beckett‘s play Happy Days, a role she had previously performed on stage and which she describes later as her favourite part. Among her other television roles is that of Mrs. Conn Brickley, Bridget’s mother, in an episode of The Irish R.M. called “The Boat’s Share.”
Kean’s many stage appearances include performances in the plays of John Millington Synge, Seán O’Casey and Brian Friel. She takes the lead role of Maggie Polpin in the 1969 world première of John B. Keane‘s play Big Maggie at the Cork Opera House. In 1978 she wins the State of New York best actress award for her performance in what has become Keane’s most successful play.
Arguably her most memorable film role is as Barry’s scheming mother in Stanley Kubrick‘s Barry Lyndon. She also plays a bigoted Irish shopkeeper in David Lean‘s Ryan’s Daughter. Her final movie appearance is in John Huston‘s The Dead (1987), in which she plays the part of Mrs. Malins.
Marie Kean dies in Donnybrook, Dublin at the age of 75 on December 30, 1993. Her husband, William Mulvey, predeceases her in 1977.
A pair of paintings valued at more than £3,000,000 are stolen by an armed gang from Russborough House in County Wicklow on June 26, 2001. The stolen paintings are Thomas Gainsborough‘s Madame Baccelli, the more valuable of the pair, and Bernardo Belotto‘s Scene of Florence.
Three masked men burst their way into the house after ramming the front door with a Mitsubishi at midday. After grabbing the paintings the men set fire to their getaway vehicle and attempt to hijack a car at gunpoint but its driver refuses to give it up. They are last seen running from the scene.
Chief Superintendent Sean Feely says that there were people in the house at the time of the robbery but no one was hurt. He adds that, because they are so well known, the paintings will be near impossible to sell. Raymond Keaveney, the Director of the National Gallery of Ireland, describes the theft as “an outrage.”
The robbery is a case of history repeating itself for Russborough House, twenty miles from Dublin, which has been the scene of two previous major art thefts.
In 1974, an Irish Republican Army (IRA) gang which includes Dr. Rose Dugdale, the British heiress, steal 19 paintings, valued at IR£8 million, from Russborough House which, at the time, is the home of the late Sir Alfred Beit, a member of the De Beers diamond family, and his wife. The couple are bound and gagged during the raid. The paintings are later found in County Cork. Dugdale and the others involved are ultimately jailed.
In 1986, a 13-strong gang headed by Martin Cahill, the Dublin crime chief who is later shot dead by the IRA, steals 18 works including some of those taken and recovered in the earlier raid. The paintings taken on this occasion include those by Johannes Vermeer, Gabriël Metsu, Francisco Goya, Thomas Gainsborough and Peter Paul Rubens. All but three of the paintings are recovered over a period of years at a number of locations, including London, Belgium, Holland and Turkey, after apparent unsuccessful attempts to sell them. The Gainsborough painting stolen on June 26 was also taken in the 1986 raid.
The Beit collection is made over to the Irish nation and many of the works are still on display at Russborough House.
(Pictured: The Mitsubishi used to ram the entrance of Russborough House sits near the front steps. The thieves torch this car before fleeing in another car. Note the gas can to the right of the car.)
The Dublin Society for Improving Husbandry, Manufactures and Other Useful Arts, which is originally founded on June 25, 1731, becomes the Royal Dublin Society on June 19, 1820.
The society is founded by members of the Dublin Philosophical Society, chiefly Thomas Prior. On July 1, 1731, at the second meeting of the Society, the designation “and Sciences” is added to the end of its name. The Society’s broad agenda is to stimulate economic activity and aid the creation of employment in Ireland. For the first few years of its existence, the Dublin Society concentrates on tillage technology, land reclamation, forestry, the production of dyestuffs, flax cultivation and other agricultural areas.
In 1738, following the publication of his pamphlet entitled Reflections and Resolutions Proper for the Gentlemen of Ireland, Samuel Madden initiates a grant or “premium” scheme to create incentives for improvements in Irish agricultural and arts. He proposes that a fund of £500 be raised for this purpose and he personally contributes £130. By 1740 the premium scheme has raised £900 and is adjudicated upon the following January and awarded to enterprises in earthenware, cotton, leatherwork, flax, surveying, as well as a number of painters and sculptors.
In 1761 the Irish Parliament votes for £12,000 to be given to the Dublin Society for the promotion of agriculture, forestry, arts and manufactures. This funding is used to increase the amount of premiums distributed by the Dublin Society. Further funds are given by Parliament to the Dublin Society on a sporadic basis until 1784 when an annual parliamentary vote of £5,000 is put in place and remains so until the dissolution of Grattan’s Parliament in 1800.
The “Royal” prefix is adopted in 1820 when George IV becomes Society patron.
The society purchases Leinster House, home of the Duke of Leinster, in 1815 and founds a natural history museum there. The society acquires its current premises at Ballsbridge in 1879 and has since increased from the original fifteen to forty acres. The premises consist of a number of exhibition halls, a stadium, meeting rooms, bars, restaurants, and RDS Simmonscourt Pavilion, a multi-purpose venue.
The Boyle Medal, named after Robert Boyle (1627–1691), is inaugurated in 1899 and is awarded jointly by the RDS and The Irish Times for scientific research of exceptional merit in Ireland. As of 2014 the medal has been awarded to 39 scientists.
Roberts’s father, Rex Roberts, played double bass with a dance band called The Melodists in the 1940s. The headmaster at The High School, Dublin, calls his father in one day to suggest that he consider move his son to a boarding school as he is spending a lot of time in detention.
After being bribed with the promise of a bicycle, Roberts is moved to a Quaker-run boarding school, Newtown School, Waterford. The move proves successful but not for the anticipated reasons. He quickly takes notice of the electric guitars of the school band and realizes that is to be his future.
In 1976, Roberts and Johnnie Fingers (Moylett) decide to put a band together and, between them, they recruit the other four members, Pete Briquette (bass), Gerry Cott (guitar), Simon Crowe (drums) and singer Bob Geldof to form The Boomtown Rats.
Following the breakup of The Boomtown Rats in 1986, Roberts works with Simply Red, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and Flesh For Lulu in the role of audio engineer on tours in the UK and the United States. He avoids playing the guitar in public for ten years, after which he and Simon Crowe play together for four years in the rhythm and blues four-piece band The Velcro Flies.
After fifteen successful years as an Independent Financial Adviser, Roberts becomes disillusioned with the life insurance industry and becomes a central heating engineer to keep himself occupied between gigs. Roberts and Crowe, with Darren Beale on second lead guitar, and Peter Barton on bass guitar and lead vocals, are now playing together as Boomtown Rats Roberts and Crowe, and are performing material from the Boomtown Rats’ first three albums across Europe and the UK.
Gallagher is born in Ballyshannon, County Donegal, on March 2, 1948. Both he and his brother Dónal are musically inclined and encouraged by their parents. At age nine, Gallagher receives his first guitar from them. After winning a talent contest when he is twelve, he begins performing with both his acoustic guitar and an electric guitar that he purchases with his prize money. It is, however, his purchase three years later of a 1961 Fender Stratocaster for £100 that becomes his primary instrument and most associated with him for the span of his lifetime.
Gallagher is initially attracted to skiffle after hearing Lonnie Donegan on the radio. While still in school, playing songs by Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran, he discovers his greatest influence in Muddy Waters. He begins experimenting with folk, blues, and rock music.
While still a young teenager, Gallagher begins playing after school with Irish showbands. In 1963, he joins one named Fontana, a sextet playing the popular hit songs of the day. The band tours Ireland and the United Kingdom, earning enough money for Gallagher to make the payments on his Stratocaster guitar. Gallagher begins to influence the band’s repertoire and successfully moulds Fontana into The Impact, changing the line-up into a rhythm and blues group. The band plays gigs in Ireland and Spain until it disbands in London, with Gallagher and the bassist and drummer continuing to perform as a trio in Hamburg, Germany.
In 1966, Gallagher returns to Ireland and forms Taste, a blues rock and R&B power trio. Initially, the band is composed of Gallagher and Cork musicians Norman Damery and Eric Kitteringham. However, by 1968, Damery and Kitteringham are replaced by Belfast musicians John Wilson on drums and Richard McCracken on bass. Performing extensively in the UK, the group supports both Cream at their Royal Albert Hall farewell concert and the blues supergroup Blind Faith on a tour of North America.
After the break-up of Taste in 1970, Gallagher tours under his own name. He hires former Deep Joy bass player Gerry McAvoy to play on his self-titled debut album, Rory Gallagher. This is the beginning of a twenty-year musical relationship between Gallagher and McAvoy. The 1970s are Gallagher’s most prolific period, producing ten albums in the decade. In 1971 he is voted Melody Maker‘s International Top Guitarist of the Year, ahead of Eric Clapton. However, despite a number of his albums reaching the UK Albums Chart, Gallagher does not attain major star status. Though he sells over thirty million albums worldwide, it is his marathon live performances that win him the greatest acclaim.
In the 1980s Gallagher continues recording and embarks on a tour of the United States. In addition, he plays with Box of Frogs, a band formed in 1983 by former members of The Yardbirds.
In the later years of his life, Gallagher develops a phobia of flying. To overcome this he receives a prescription for a powerful sedative. This medication, combined with his alcohol use, results in severe liver damage. Despite his condition he continues touring. By his final performance on January 10, 1995 in the Netherlands, he is visibly ill and the remainder of the tour is cancelled. He is admitted to King’s College Hospital in London in March 1995. His liver is failing and the doctors determine that a liver transplant is the only possible course of action. After 13 weeks in intensive care, his health suddenly worsens when he contracts a Staphylococcal infection. Gallagher dies on June 14, 1995, and is buried in St. Oliver’s Cemetery just outside Ballincollig near Cork.
In 1908, at the age of ten, de Valois starts attending ballet lessons. At the age of thirteen she begins her professional training at the Lila Field Academy for Children. It is at this time that she changes her name and makes her professional debut as a principal dancer in pantomime at the Lyceum Theatre in the West End.
The success of de Valois’s ballet Job: A Masque for Dancing for the Camargo Society in 1931, followed by her association with Lilian Baylis, director of the Old Vic Theatre, leads to the founding in 1931 of the Vic-Wells Ballet Company and the Sadler’s Wells School. She traces the history of the company, from its founding until it becomes the Royal Ballet in 1956, in Invitation to the Ballet (1937) and Come Dance with Me (1957).
Besides directing the company that she created, de Valois choreographs numerous ballets, including Checkmate (1937) and Don Quixote (1950). By drawing from English tradition for her choreographic material, as in The Rake’s Progress (1935), inspired by William Hogarth’s series of engravings, and The Prospect Before Us (1940), modeled on Thomas Rowlandson’s caricature of the same name, she creates a uniquely national ballet company. Her narrative ballets include prominent roles for male dancers, giving them artistic opportunities often neglected by other choreographers.
In 1963 de Valois retires as director of the Royal Ballet, although she remains head of the school until 1972. She is created a Dame of the British Empire in 1951 and is named Companion of Honour in 1980.
de Valois keeps her private life very distinct from her professional life, making only the briefest of references to her marriage to Dr. Arthur Blackall Connell, a physician and surgeon from Wandsworth, in her autobiographical writings. In April 1964 she is the subject of This Is Your Life, when she is surprised by Eamonn Andrews at the home of the dancer Frederick Ashton in London. She continues to make public appearances until her death in London on March 8, 2001 at the age of 102.
Waddell is the tenth and youngest child of Hugh Waddell, a Presbyterian minister and missionary who is lecturing in the Imperial University. She spends the first eleven years of her life in Japan before her family returns to Belfast. Her mother dies shortly afterwards, and her father remarries. Hugh Waddell himself dies and leaves his younger children in the care of their stepmother. Following the marriage of her elder sister Meg, she is left at home to care for her stepmother, whose health is deteriorating by this time.
Waddell is educated at Victoria College for Girls and Queen’s University Belfast, where she studies under Professor Gregory Smith, graduating in 1911. She follows her BA with first class honours in English with a master’s degree, and in 1919 enrolls in Somerville College, Oxford, to study for her doctorate. A traveling scholarship from Lady Margaret Hall in 1923 allows her to conduct research in Paris. It is at this time that she meets her life-long friend, Maude Clarke.
Waddell is best known for bringing to light the history of the medieval goliards in her 1927 book The Wandering Scholars and translating their Latin poetry in the companion volume Medieval Latin Lyrics. A second anthology, More Latin Lyrics, is compiled in the 1940s but not published until after her death. Her other works range widely in subject matter. For example, she also writes plays. Her first play is The Spoiled Buddha, which is performed at the Opera House, Belfast, by the Ulster Literary Society. Her The Abbe Prevost is staged in 1935. Her historical novel Peter Abelard is published in 1933. It is critically well received and becomes a bestseller.
A serious debilitating neurological disease puts an end to her writing career in 1950. She dies in London on March 5, 1965, and is buried in Magherally churchyard, County Down, Northern Ireland. A prize-winning biography of her by the Benedictine nun DameFelicitas Corrigan is published in 1986.
Keane is born on Church Street in Listowel on July 21, 1928, the son of a national school teacher, William B. Keane, and his wife Hannah (née Purtill). He is educated at Listowel National School and then at St. Michael’s College, Listowel. He works as a chemist’s assistant for A.H. Jones who dabbles in buying antiques. He has various jobs in the UK between 1951 and 1955 working as a street cleaner and a bartender, living in a variety of places including Northampton and London. It is while he is in Northampton that Keane is first published in an unnamed women’s magazine for which he receives £15.
After returning from the United Kingdom, Keane is a pub owner in Listowel from 1955.
Keane marries Mary O’Connor at Knocknagoshel Church on January 5, 1955 and they have four children: Billy, Conor, John and Joanna. He is an Honorary Life Member of the Royal Dublin Society from 1991, serves as president of Irish PEN and is a founder member of the Society of Irish Playwrights as well as a member of Aosdána. He is named the patron of the Listowel Players after the Listowel Drama Group fractures. He remains a prominent member of the Fine Gael party throughout his life, never being shy of political debate.
Keane cites many literary influences including Bryan MacMahon and George Fitzmaurice, fellow Kerry writers and playwrights. His personal influences are numerous but, most notably he thanks his father and his wife, Mary. He is grateful for his father’s help with early editing, allowing him access to his personal library, and encouraging him to continue his work until he is successful. He is also influenced by the local population and the patrons of his pub from which he bases some of his characters.
Keane dies on May 30, 2002 of complications from prostate cancer, which he had been battling for eight years. His death comes on the eve of the annual Listowel Writers’ Festival, a week-long event at which he had long been a dominating and avuncular presence.
Keane’s nephew is the investigative journalist Fergal Keane. His son John is a journalist with the Kilkenny People while his son Billy regularly writes a column for the Irish Independent.
The son of a Roman Catholic wine merchant, Moore graduates from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1799 and then studies law in London. His major poetic work, Irish Melodies (1807–34), earns him an income of £500 annually for a quarter of a century. It contains such titles as “The Last Rose of Summer” and “Oft in the Stilly Night.” The Melodies, a group of 130 poems set to the music of Moore and of Sir John Stevenson and performed for London’s aristocracy, arouses sympathy and support for the Irish nationalists, among whom Moore is a popular hero.
Lalla-Rookh (1817), a narrative poem set in an atmosphere of Oriental splendour, gives Moore a reputation among his contemporaries rivaling that of Byron and Sir Walter Scott. It is perhaps the most translated poem of its time, and it earns what was until then the highest price paid by an English publisher for a poem (£3,000). His many satirical works, such as The Fudge Family in Paris (1818), portray the politics and manners of the Regency era.
In 1824 Moore becomes a participant in one of the most celebrated episodes of the Romantic era. He is the recipient of Byron’s memoirs, but he and the publisher John Murray burn them, presumably to protect Byron. He later brings out the Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (1830), in which he includes a life of the poet. His lifelong espousal of the Catholic cause leads him to produce such brilliant works as his parody of agrarian insurgency, The Memoirs of Captain Rock (1824), and his courageous biography of the revolutionary leader of the 1798 rebellion, The Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1831).
Moore’s personal life is dogged by tragedy including the deaths of all five of his children within his lifetime and a stroke in later life, which disables him from performances, the activity for which he is most renowned. Moore dies while being cared for by his wife, Elizabeth (nee Dyke), at Sloperton Cottage, Bromham, Wiltshire, England on February 26, 1852. His remains are in a vault at St. Nicholas churchyard, Bromham, within view of his cottage-home and beside his daughter Anastasia.
(Pictured: Thomas Moore, after a painting by Thomas Lawrence)
Corr, the youngest of four children, is born to Gerry Corr, a manager of the payroll department of the Irish Electricity Supply Board (ESB), and his wife, Jean, a housewife. Gerry and Jean have their own band, Sound Affair, which plays songs by ABBA and the Eagles in local pubs in Dundalk where they would often bring along their children.
With the encouragement of her parents, Corr takes up the tin whistle and is taught the piano by her father. Throughout their teenage years, she and her siblings often practise in her brother Jim‘s bedroom at a house he had rented. She sings lead vocals; her sister Sharon plays the violin and sister Caroline and Jim both play keyboards. She takes part in school plays at her school, Dundalk’s Dún Lughaidh Convent.
Corr debuts in 1990 as the lead singer of the Celticfolk rock and pop rock group The Corrs along with her three siblings. Aside from singing lead vocals she plays the tin whistle, the ukulele, and the piano.
With the others, Corr releases six studio albums, two compilation albums, one remix album and two live albums. She also pursues a solo career, releasing her debut album, Ten Feet High, in 2007. The album moves away from the sound of the Corrs and features a dance-pop sound. Her next album, released on May 30, 2011, is entirely made up of covers of songs that were important to her when younger.
A pair of paintings valued at more than £3,000,000 are stolen by an armed gang from 
seamus dubhghaill 