seamus dubhghaill

Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

Category Archives: Arts & Music


by Leave a comment

Birth of Composer Geoffrey Molyneux Palmer

Geoffrey Molyneux Palmer (Irish: Seathrún de Pámar), Irish composer, is born to Protestant Irish parents in Staines, Middlesex, England, on October 8, 1882. His compositions consist mainly of operas and vocal music, among them the first musical settings of poems by James Joyce.

Palmer grows up in South Woodford, an area of East London, where his father, Abram Smythe Palmer, is vicar at Holy Trinity Church. He studies at the University of Oxford where, in 1901, he is the youngest Bachelor of Music (BMus) in college history. Between 1904 and 1907 he studies composition with Charles Villiers Stanford at the Royal College of Music, London. He moves to Ireland in 1910 where he is initially active as a church organist in Dublin suburbs. From his early twenties he suffers from multiple sclerosis, which makes a professional independence increasingly difficult.

Palmer’s music includes at least three operas, a number of choral pieces and many songs. His strong interest in opera comes during a politically difficult period in Irish history. Ireland is struggling for independence, and cultural politicians often regard opera (and classical music in general) as alien to Irish culture. Initially, however, he is successful, his earliest stage work being Finn Varra Maa (a transliteration from the Gaelic meaning “good Finbar”), subtitled The Irish Santa Claus. It survives as a libretto only, published in a drama series by Talbot Press, Dublin, in 1917. Contrary to what the (sub-)title may suggest, the work is a political satire that is much criticised for its nationalism. Sruth na Maoile (“The Sea of Moyle”) is first performed in July 1923 and restaged by the O’Mara Opera Company in the cultural by-programme of the Tailteann Games in August 1924. Its story is based on the legend of the Children of Lir, while the music relies on numerous references to Irish traditional music, including the song Silent O Moylefrom Thomas Moore‘s Irish Melodies. A third work, Grania Goes (1924), conceived as a light, comic opera, cannot be performed in the years following Irish independence. The manuscript scores of the Sruth na Maoile and Grania Goes are in the National Library of Ireland.

Between 1925 and 1930, Palmer embarks on a cycle of three full-scale operas on the Cuchullain cycle to words by William Mervyn Crofton. In one of them, Deirdre of the Sorrows (1925), Crofton acknowledges Palmer’s “beautiful music.” Despite this, Palmer’s illness prevents the completion of the score, which is later handed over to the composer Staf Gebruers (1902–70), but they are never performed. The manuscript scores of the operas Cuchullain and Deirdre of the Sorrows composed by Gebruers are held by his son Adrian. Unfortunately, despite extensive searching, the score of The Wooing of Emer has not been located, though it is referenced in Gebruers’ own inventories and mentioned as being of three hours duration. In addition, there is a copy of The King’s Song, also composed by Gebruers with lyrics by Crofton and described as from Act 1 of The Black Hag, but whether or not this has any connection with Palmer is unknown.

Palmer is mainly known as the composer of light songs and ballads, often in a folkloristic style, that find publishers in England and are frequently performed. “They show a skilled hand with a talent for vocal harmony but little originality.” His choral music is mainly on a similar miniature scale, an exception being the early cantata The Abbot of Innisfallen (1909). There are some isolated examples of orchestral music performed by the orchestra of Radio Éireann, but the surviving references may not give a full picture of his output.

In the last decades of his life, Palmer was confined to a wheelchair and depends upon the care of his two sisters, who were running Hillcourt, a private girls’ boarding school in Glenageary, near their home in Sandycove (south Dublin). Palmer dies in Dublin on November 29, 1957.


by Leave a comment

Death of Séamus Ennis, Musician, Singer & Music Collector

Séamus Ennis (Irish: Séamas Mac Aonghusa), Irish musician, singer and Irish music collector, dies in Naul, County Dublin, on October 5, 1982. He is most noted for his uilleann pipe playing and is partly responsible for the revival of the instrument during the twentieth century, having co-founded Na Píobairí Uilleann, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to the promotion of the uilleann pipes and its music. He is recognised for preserving almost 2,000 Irish songs and dance-tunes as part of the work he does with the Irish Folklore Commission. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest uilleann pipers of all time.

Ennis’s father, James, works for the Irish civil service at Naul, County Dublin. In 1908, James Ennis is in a pawn shop in London and purchases a bag containing the pieces of a set of old uilleann pipes. They were made in the mid nineteenth century by Coyne Pipemakers of Thomas Street in Dublin. In 1912, he comes in first in the Oireachtas competition for warpipes and second in the uilleann pipes. He is also a prize-winning dancer. In 1916, he marries Mary Josephine McCabe, an accomplished fiddle player from County Monaghan. They have six children, Angela, Séamus, Barbara, and twins, Cormac and Ursula (Pixie) and Desmond. Séamus is born on May 5, 1919, in Jamestown in Finglas, Dublin. James Ennis is a member of the Fingal trio, which includes Frank O’Higgins on fiddle and John Cawley on flute, and performs regularly with them on the radio. At the age of thirteen, Séamus starts receiving lessons on the pipes from his father. He attends a Gaelscoil, Cholmcille, and a Gaelcholáiste, Coláiste Mhuire, which gives him a knowledge of the Irish language that serves him well in later life. He sits in an exam to become Employment Exchange clerk but is too far down the list to be offered a job. He is twenty and unemployed.

Colm Ó Lochlainn is editor of Irish Street Ballads and a friend of the Ennis family. In 1938, Ennis confides in Colm that he intends to move to England to join the British Army. Colm immediately offers him a job at The Three Candles Press. There Ennis learns all aspects of the printing trade. This includes writing down slow airs for printed scores – a skill which later proves important. Colm is director of an Irish language choir, An Claisceadal, which Ennis joins. In 1942, during The Emergency, shortages and rationing mean that things become difficult in the printing trade. Professor Seamus Ó Duilearge of the Irish Folklore Commission hires the 23-year-old to collect songs. He is given “pen, paper and pushbike” and a salary of three pounds per week. Off he goes to Connemara.

From 1942 to 1947, working for the Irish Folklore Commission, Ennis collects songs in west Munster; counties Galway, Cavan, Mayo, Donegal, Kerry; the Aran Islands and the Scottish Hebrides. His knowledge of Scottish Gaelic enables him to transcribe much of the John Lorne Campbell collection of songs. Elizabeth Cronin of Ballyvourney, County Cork, is so keen to chat to Ennis on his visits that she writes down her own songs and hands them over as he arrives, and then gets down to conversation. He has a natural empathy with the musicians and singers he meets. In August 1947, he starts work as an outside broadcast officer with Raidió Éireann. He is a presenter and records Willie Clancy, Seán Reid and Micho Russell for the first time. There is an air of authority in his voice. In 1951, Alan Lomax and Jean Ritchie arrived from the United States to record Irish songs and tunes. The tables are turned as Ennis becomes the subject of someone else’s collection. There is a photograph from 1952/53 showing Ritchie huddled over the tape recorder while Ennis plays uilleann pipes.

Late in 1951, Ennis joins the BBC. He moves to London to work with producer Brian George. In 1952, he marries Margaret Glynn. They have two children, the organist Catherine Ennis and Christopher. His job is to record the traditional music of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland and to present it on the BBC Home Service. The programme is called As I Roved Out and runs until 1958. Meeting up with Alan Lomax again, he is largely responsible for the album Folk and Primitive Music (volume on Ireland) on the Columbia Records label.

In 1958, after his contract with the BBC is not renewed, Ennis starts doing freelance work, first in England then back in Ireland, with the new TV station Teilifis Éireann. Soon he is relying totally on his musical ability to make a living. About this time, his marriage breaks down and he returns to Ireland. He suffers from tuberculosis and is ill for some time. In 1964, he performs at the Newport Folk Festival. His father gives him the pipes he had bought in 1908. Although most pipers can be classed as playing in a tight style or an open style, Ennis is in between. He is a master of the slow air, knowing how to decorate long notes with taste and discreet variation.

Two events will live in legend among pipers. The first is in Bettystown, County Meath, in 1968, when the society of Irish pipers, Na Píobairí Uilleann, is formed. Breandán Breathnach is playing a tape of his own piping. Ennis asks, “What year?” Breandán replies, “1948.” Ennis says, “So I thought.” For a couple of hours the younger players perform while Ennis sits in silence. Eventually he is asked to play. Slowly he takes off his coat and rolls up his sleeves. He spends 20 minutes tuning up his 130-year-old pipes. He then asks the gathering whether all the tape recorders are ready and proceeds to play for over an hour. To everyone’s astonishment he then offers his precious pipes to Willie Clancy to play a set. Clancy demurs but eventually gives in. Next, Liam O’Flynn is asked to play them, and so on, round the room. The second unforgettable session is in Dowlings’ Pub in Prosperous, County Kildare. Christy Moore is there, as well as most of the future members of Planxty.

Ennis never runs any school of piping but his enthusiasm infuses everyone he meets. In the early 1970s, he shares a house with Liam O’Flynn for almost three years. Finally, he purchases a piece of land in Naul and lives in a mobile home there. One of his last performances is at the Willie Clancy Summer School in 1982. He dies on October 5, 1982. His pipes are bequeathed to Liam O’Flynn. Radio producer Peter Browne produces a compilation of his performances, called The Return from Fingal, spanning 40 years.

Séamus Ennis Road in his native Finglas is named in his honour. The Séamus Ennis Arts Centre in Naul is opened in his honour, to commemorate his work and to promote the traditional arts. He is also the subject of Christy Moore’s song “The Easter Snow.” This is the title of a slow air Ennis used to play, and one after which he named his final home in Naul.


by Leave a comment

Death of Artist Samuel McCloy

Samuel McCloy, Irish artist who trains at Belfast School of Design and later at Somerset House, dies in Balham, South London, on October 4, 1904. He exhibits widely in group shows across the British Isles and is known for his watercolours, genre paintings, still life and landscapes. He is also a commercial designer, illustrator, and an educator who is for a time Master at Waterford School of Art.

Born on March 13, 1831, in Lisburn, County Antrim, McCloy is the youngest of five children, born to Peter McCloy, a painter, and his wife Martha Phelan. He studies at the School of Design in Belfast from 1850 to 1851 while serving an apprenticeship in engraving, with J and T Smyth. He then spende a year at the Central School, Somerset House in London before being appointed Master at the Waterford School of Art around 1853, when he also becomes a visiting instructor to several other institutions. In the spring of 1865 he marries his student, the Waterford artist Ellen Lucy Harris, the fourth daughter of a banker named Richard Harris. The dismembered corpse of McCloy’s mother is recovered from the River Suir in September of the same year. She had been missing since the previous November.

Between 1873 and 1891 McCloy shows nine works at the Royal Society of British Artists. Upon his return to Belfast around 1874, he works freelance designing greetings cards for Marcus Ward & Co., and in creating damask designs for linen manufacturers. He illustrates Lucy Sale-Barker‘s Sunny Childhood, published by Routledge in 1887, and he is for a time employed by The Illustrated London News.

McCloy shows just once at the Royal Academy of Arts with a work entitled The Haunt of Meditation in 1859. He exhibits infrequently at the Royal Hibernian Academy between 1862 and 1882, where he displays sixteen works in that time. He displays eleven works in the 1876 Industrial Exhibition at Belfast’s Ulster Hall. In 1880, he shows at Rodman and Company in London where the writer in the Belfast Telegraph indicates that McCloy is becoming a popular artist and is receiving extensive patronage.

Following his relocation to London in 1881, McCloy contributes works to numerous regional exhibitions, including the spring exhibition of the Derby Sketching Club in 1883, Nottingham Castle Museum’s autumn exhibition of 1888, and at Exeter‘s Eland Art Gallery in 1892. He exhibits with the Royal Scottish Academy in 1882 and with the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours in 1887. He is also a member of the Belfast Art Society, an antecedent to the Royal Ulster Academy.

After a year-long illness that prevents him from working, McCloy dies in Balham, South London, on October 4, 1904. He is survived by his wife, Ellen, and nine daughters. The Lisburn Museum in his hometown offers a belated retrospective of his work in 1981 to mark the one-hundred fiftieth anniversary of his birth. The exhibition is the first known solo display of McCloy’s work and consists of 58 works. The catalogue for this show is written by Eileen Black and funded by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

McCloy’s work can be seen in many public collections including the Ulster Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales, the National Gallery of Ireland, and in the Irish Linen Centre and Lisburn Museum.


by Leave a comment

Birth of Annie Horniman, Theatre Patron & Manager

Annie Elizabeth Fredericka Horniman CH, English theatre patron and manager, is born at Surrey Mount, Forest Hill, London, on October 3, 1860. She establishes the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and founds the first regional repertory theatre company in Britain at the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester. She encourages the work of new writers and playwrights, including W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and members of what become known as the Manchester School of dramatists.

Horniman, the elder child of Frederick John Horniman and his first wife Rebekah (née Emslie). Her father is a tea merchant and the founder of the Horniman Museum. Her grandfather is John Horniman who founds the family tea business of Horniman and Company. She and her younger brother, Emslie, are educated privately at their home. Her father is opposed to the theatre, which he considers sinful, but their German governess takes her and Emslie secretly to a performance of The Merchant of Venice at The Crystal Palace when she is fourteen years old.

Horniman’s father allows her to enter the Slade School of Fine Art in 1882. Here she discovers that her talent in art is limited but she develops other interests, particularly in the theatre and opera. She takes great pleasure in Richard Wagner‘s Der Ring des Nibelungen and in Henrik Ibsen‘s plays. She cycles in London and twice over the Alps, smokes in public and explores alternative religions. The “lonely rich girl” has become “an independent-minded woman.” In 1890 she joins the occult society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where she remains a member until disagreements with its leaders lead to her resignation in 1903. During this time she meets and becomes a friend of W. B. Yeats, acting as his amanuensis for some years. Their friendship endures. Frank O’Connor recalls that on the day Yeats hears of her death, he spends the entire evening speaking of his memories of her.

Horniman’s first venture into the theatre is in 1894 and is made possible by a legacy from her grandfather. She anonymously supports her friend Florence Farr in a season of new plays at the Royal Avenue Theatre, London. This includes a new play by Yeats, The Land of Heart’s Desire, and the première of George Bernard Shaw’s play Arms and the Man. In 1903, Yeats persuades her to go to Dublin to back productions by the Irish National Theatre Society. Here she discovers her skill as a theatre administrator. She purchases a property and develops it into the Abbey Theatre, which opens in December 1904. Although she moves back to live in England, she continues to support the theatre financially until 1910. Meanwhile, in Manchester she purchases and renovates the Gaiety Theatre in 1908 and develops it into the first regional repertory theatre in Britain.

At the Gaiety, Horniman appoints Ben Iden Payne as the director and employs actors on 40-week contracts, alternating their work between large and small parts. The plays produced include classics such as Euripides and Shakespeare, and she introduces works by contemporary playwrights such as Ibsen and Shaw. She also encourages local writers who form what becomes known as the Manchester School of dramatists, the leading members of which are Harold Brighouse, Stanley Houghton and Allan Monkhouse. The Gaiety company undertakes tours of the United States and Canada in 1912 and 1913. Horniman becomes a well-known public figure in Manchester, lecturing on subjects which include women’s suffrage and her views about the theatre. In 1910 she is awarded the honorary degree of MA by the University of Manchester. During World War I the Gaiety continues to stage plays but financial difficulties lead to the disbandment of the permanent company in 1917, following which productions in the theatre are by visiting companies. In 1921 she sells the theatre to a cinema company.

As a result of her tea connection, Horniman is known as “Hornibags.” She holds court at the Midland Hotel, wearing exotic clothing and openly smoking cigarettes, which is considered scandalous at the time. She introduces Manchester to what is called at the time “the play of ideas.” The theatre critic James Agate notes that her high-minded theatrical ventures have “an air of gloomy strenuousness” about them.

Horniman moves to London where she keeps a flat in Portman Square. In 1933 she is made a Companion of Honour. She and Algernon Blackwood might be the only past or present members of an occult society to receive a United Kingdom honour.

Horniman dies, unmarried, on August 6, 1937, while visiting friends in Shere, Surrey. Her estate amounts to a little over £50,000. The Annie Horniman Papers are held in the John Rylands Research Institute and Library at the University of Manchester. Her portrait, painted by John Butler Yeats in 1904, hangs in the public area of the Abbey Theatre.


by Leave a comment

Birth of Kathleen Behan, Irish Republican & Folk Singer

Kathleen Behan (née Kearney), Irish republican and folk singer, and mother of Irish authors Brendan, Brian and Dominic, is born on September 18, 1889, at 49 Capel Street, Dublin.

She is the fifth child and youngest daughter of pork butcher and grocer, John Kearney (1854–97), and his wife Kathleen Kearney (née McGuinness) (1860–1907). She has four brothers and two sisters. Her father is from Rosybrook, County Louth and her mother is from Rathmaiden, Slane, County Meath, both coming from prosperous farming families. Her father has a business on Lower Dorset Street, with a grocery, pub and a row of houses. Owing to his own poor management, by the time she is born he has a smaller business on Dolphin’s Barn Lane. Following his death in 1897, she and her sisters are placed in the Goldenbridge orphanage at Inchicore by their mother. She is there from 1898 to 1904 where she becomes an avid reader. When she leaves, she rejoins her family in a one-room tenement flat on Gloucester Street.

Her oldest sibling, Peadar Kearney, is an ardent republican who writes the lyrics to the song that becomes the Irish national anthem, ”Amhrán na bhFiann”(English: “The Soldier’s Song”). It is through him that she meets a printer’s compositor and member of the Irish Volunteers, Jack Furlong. They marry in 1916. She is an active member of Cumann na mBan, and serves as a courier to the General Post Office, Dublin and other outposts during the 1916 Easter Rising. At the same time, Furlong fights in the Jacob’s factory garrison. The couple has two sons: Roger Casement (Rory) Furlong (1917–87) and Sean Furlong (born March 1919). Sean is born six month’s after she is widowed when Furlong dies in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. She lives with her mother-in-law, who is also a republican and seamstress who makes Irish Volunteer uniforms. She is arrested for running an Irish Republican Army (IRA) safe house. She works for a short time for Maud Gonne as a housekeeper, where she meets W. B. Yeats and Sarah Purser. A study painted of her by Purser (above) is now in the National Gallery of Ireland entitled The Sad Girl. From 1918 to 1922 she works as a clerk in the Dublin Corporation, while also a caretaker in the Harcourt Street branch of the Irish White Cross republican aid association.

In 1922 she marries Stephen Behan, house painter, trade unionist and fellow republican. The couple has four sons and one daughter: Brendan (b. 1923), Seamus (b. 1925), Brian (b. 1926), Dominic (b. 1928), and Carmel (b. 1932). Brendan is born while his father is imprisoned during the Irish Civil War, and Behan claims that Michael Collins gives her money while she is pregnant. Stephen’s mother owns three slum tenements, so the Behans live rent-free in a one-room basement flat at 14 Russell Street. Owing to her disdain at gossiping on the house steps, she is nicknamed “Lady Behan” by her neighbours. When Stephen’s mother dies in 1936, the Behans moved to a newly built council house in Crumlin, living at 70 Kildare Road. The family finds the new house far from work and school, and the local area devoid of community.

The family experiences extreme poverty frequently, owing to Stephen’s unemployment and during the nine month long building strike of 1936. Behan attempts to claim a pension as her first husband had served in 1916, but her application is rejected. She had said the exposure to flour had effected Furlong’s lungs negatively. It is declined as she had remarried before the enactment of the Army Pensions Act 1923. Despite their circumstances, the house attracts conversation, music, books and politics. The Behan’s republican, socialist, labour activist and anti-clericalism have a strong effect on their sons, particularly Brendan and Dominic. Such is the volume of radical meetings that take place at the Behan home, it is dubbed “the Kremlin” by their neighbours, and a “madhouse” by Stephen. During The Emergency of 1939 to 1945 she fights against local shopkeepers who ignore price controls, and is labelled as “red” for her anti-Franco and pro-Stalin sympathies. Her reply to the branding of her as such is “I’m not red, I’m scarlet.”

From the 1950s onwards, Behan shares international fame with her sons Dominic and Brendan. She often travels to London to see their plays, eventually appearing on British and Irish television and cultivating her own following. She is badly injured when she is struck by a motorcycle, a day before Stephen’s death in 1967. Owing to the effect of these injuries, she moves in 1970 to the Sacred Heart Residence of the Little Sisters of the Poor, Sybil Hill, Raheny.

In 1981, she records an album When All the World Was Young. Taped conversations of her reminiscences are made into an autobiographic book, Mother of all the Behans, by her son Brian in 1984. A one-woman stage adaptation of the book by Peter Sheridan and starring Rosaleen Linehan is acclaimed in Ireland, Britain and North America.

Behan dies in the nursing home in Raheny on April 26, 1984, and is buried in Dean’s Grange Cemetery.

(Pictured: Portrait of Kathleen Behan by Sarah Purser, National Gallery of Ireland)


by Leave a comment

Death of Sybil le Brocquy, Playwright & Conservationist

Sybil le Brocquy, Irish playwright, patron of the arts and conservationist, dies in Dublin on September 4, 1973. Two of her three children are involved with the arts: a son is the painter Louis le Brocquy and her daughter is the sculptor Melanie le Brocquy.

She is born Helen Mary Sybil Staunton on December 21, 1892, in Herbert Street, Dublin, to Dorothy Eleanor Redington and Peter Maurice Staunton. Her father is a barrister who later becomes a solicitor. Though he moves to Aram Lodge, Castlerea, County Roscommon where he practises law, she grows up in Dublin and Howth, going to secondary school in Loreto Abbey, Rathfarnham, and later at Loreto Convent, St. Stephen’s Green. She goes on to study German and singing in Koblenz. She marries Albert le Brocquy on December 30, 1915, and settles in Dublin. They have three children, Louis, Noel and Melanie.

Le Brocquy becomes involved in various women’s movements, helping to organise the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in July 1926. She is involved with the League of Nations Association as well as helps to establish Irish Civil Rights, PEN International, and Amnesty International in Ireland. She is an active member of Old Dublin Society and for a time president of the Irish Women Writers’ Society. She acts with the Drama League appearing as Helen Staunton. She writes plays and dramatic pieces which are staged by the Drama League at the Abbey Theatre and broadcast by Radio Éireann.

Her writings and work are often historically investigative, finding W. B. Yeats’s birthplace and arguing that Jonathan Swift had a child by Vanessa. She is involved in the Swift Tercentenary celebrations with Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh. As a result of her work, including with Trinity College Dublin Library and representing the Library on the Royal Irish Academy’s National Committee for Anglo-Irish Literature, she is co-opted to the Cultural Committee of the Department of External Affairs and appointed a Trustee of the National Library of Ireland. She is an excellent organiser and fundraiser and is heavily responsible for securing money for the Gate Theatre, Dublin, in 1970. She also initiates the literary prize, the Book of the Year award.

Le Brocquy becomes ill with an undiagnosed illness and dies on September 4, 1973, at the Meath Hospital, Dublin.


by Leave a comment

Birth of Mario Rosenstock, Actor, Comedian, Impressionist & Musician

Mario Rosenstock, Irish actor, comedian, impressionist and musician, is born in London, England, on August 31, 1970.

Rosenstock first comes to the attention of the Irish public playing the role of Dr. David Hanlon in the soap opera Glenroe in the 1990s.

However, he is now best known for the popular Gift Grub segments which have featured on The Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show on Today FM since May 1999 which Rosenstock creates alongside Paul McLoone, a radio presenter with Today FM and frontman of the Northern Irish pop-punk/new-wave band, The Undertones.

Gift Grub is a series of comic sketches, impersonations and parodies that featured Rosenstock assuming the personae of Bertie Ahern, Ronan Keating, Colin Farrell and Roy Keane among many others. He also provides the manic voice of Right Price Tiles radio spokesperson “Daft Dave.”

Rosenstock performs an impersonation of José Mourinho in a parody of a song from the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. This spreads like wildfire on Internet message boards and eventually it is played on a Sky Sports broadcast. Mourinho hears the song and enjoys the impersonation so much he asks Rosenstock to perform a private show for him and the Chelsea F.C. squad. Rosenstock later releases, with Mourinho’s blessing, a single version of “José and his Amazing Technicolor Overcoat.” He also releases another song (“I Sign a Little Player or Two“) on the internet with a parody of Mourinho in an interview then breaking into song.

In 2005, Rosenstock stars as Keano in the comedy musical play I, Keano, which concerns Keane storming out of the Republic of Ireland national football squad during preparations for the 2002 FIFA World Cup.

In 2005, Rosenstock achieves the Christmas number one single in the Irish Singles Chart, with a parody of Will Young‘s song Leave Right Now (which itself is a Christmas number-one in 2003). The parody concerned Roy Keane’s controversial departure from Manchester United and his falling-out with Alex Ferguson. 

Between December 2007 and May 2009, Rosenstock works on a puppet comedy series entitled Special 1 TV (originally known as I’m on Setanta Sports), which is presented as a parody weekly football talk show hosted by “José Mourinho.” He voices all the puppet characters on the sketch, with the exception of “Rafael Benitez,” who is performed by Keith Burke, including the main character Mourinho, his studio co-hosts “Sven-Göran Eriksson” and “Wayne Rooney,” and regular phone-in callers like “Alex Ferguson,” “Arsène Wenger,” “Roy Keane” and “Mick McCarthy,” as well as the non-football-related characters, Nelson Mandela, Willie Nelson, Barack Obama and Tom Cruise.

Rosenstock receives the Outstanding Achievement Award at the 11th annual PPI (Phonographic Performance Ireland) Radio Awards in 2011.

In November 2012 his new show called The Mario Rosenstock Show starts on RTÉ2. A second series of the show begins to air in September 2013.

Rosenstock is married, with two children. His uncle, Gabriel Rosenstock, is one of Ireland’s most notable Irish language poets and member of Innti with Michael Davitt, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Liam Ó Muirthile. Rosenstock’s grandfather George is a doctor and writer from Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. He never speaks German again after the war out of shame. His grandmother is a nurse from Athenry, County Galway.


by Leave a comment

Death of Wilhelmina Geddes, Stained Glass Artist

Wilhelmina Geddes, Irish stained glass artist who is an important figure within the Irish Arts and Crafts movement and also the twentieth-century British stained glass revival, dies in London, England, on August 10, 1955. Her notable works include windows at St. Bartholomew’s Anglican Church (Ottawa, Canada), St. Peter’s Church (Lampeter, Wales), and the King Albert Memorial Window, St. Martin’s Cathedral (Ypres, Belgium).

Geddes is born on her maternal grandparent’s farm at Drumreilly Cottage in Leitrim, County Leitrim, on May 25, 1887. She is the eldest of four children, three girls and a boy, of William Geddes and his wife Eliza Jane Stafford. The family, who migrates to Ireland from Scotland, has mainly been farmers. Her father, a Methodist, who is born near his father’s farm at Tandragee, County Armagh, emigrates to the United States as a young man, working as a labourer for the railway construction business. This serves a useful purpose as he had worked as a site engineer at the Cavan, Leitrim and Roscommon Railway Company. When she is still an infant her parents move to their native home in Belfast, so her father can set up in business as a building contractor.

Geddes begins drawing subjects from life and nature from the age of four. She learns first how to draw from the school mistress in Ayrshire, where her father occasionally goes shooting. She begins her studies at Methodist College Belfast along with her three younger sisters. She later moves to the Belfast School of Art. She is encouraged by Rosamond Praeger, a sculptor from County Down, to continue with her studies. She is accepted as a student to study at the Belfast School of Art, Ulster University. This is where she adapts and improves her style and is introduced to a professional standard of art work.

While still studying at the Belfast School of Art, Geddes takes part in the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland‘s fourth exhibition. For this exhibition, she contributes a glowingly coloured illustration of the book Cinderella Dressing the Ugly Sister (Dublin City Gallery), which she had created. It is at this exhibition that her work is spotted by Sarah Purser, a well established painter seeking newly trained students to introduce to stained glass artistry. Purser, who goes on to be her lifelong mentor, invites the young Geddes to join her in Dublin, working under the established stained glass artist William Orpen.

Geddes contributes a watercolour illustration of a Ballad Seller with the Belfast Art Society in 1907. She is elected as an Associate of the Belfast Art Society’s successor, the Ulster Academy of Arts, in 1933 before promotion to Honorary Academician in 1935. She shows five illustrations in the 1911 Oireachtas Exhibition. It is some twenty-one years before she returns to the Oireachtas when she exhibits three cartoons and three sketches for stained glass in 1932.

Geddes joins Purser at the acclaimed stained glass workshop called An Túr Gloine in 1910. The workshop is held in Dublin’s Metropolitan School of Art. It is here that she discovers her passion for the craftsmanship of stained glass artistry and creates her most important works.

During her early years at An Túr Gloine, Geddes’s originality shines, and important commissions come from St. Ann’s Church, Dawson Street, Dublin and the Presbyterian church in Rathgar. Dogged by illness, she returns to Belfast before 1916 and lives between there and Dublin until moving in 1925, as she has long wanted, to work in London at The Glass House, Fulham. While working at The Glass House, she instructs the Irish painter and stained glass artist Evie Hone.

Geddes’s work is considered pioneering and represents a rejection of the Late Victorian approach. She creates a new view of men in stained glass windows, portraying them with close-shaven crew cuts. The muscularity and tension of her portraiture is matched by the radical design of her constructions. Ambitious large-scale projects, as at the cathedral in Ypres, are equalled by the drama of smaller-scale work at Wallasey (Lancashire) and Wallsend (Northumberland), or war memorial windows in obscure country churches.

Despite the hardships of living in London during World War II, poverty, and ill health, Geddes designs seventeen full-scale stained glass masterpieces, sixteen of which she completes.

Geddes dies on August 10, 1955 in London of a pulmonary embolism. She is buried in Carnmoney Cemetery, County Antrim, along with her mother and sister Ethel. Even after moving to London, she claims that her native identity never wavered as she says she was always “a Belfast woman.”


by Leave a comment

Death of Joan O’Hara, Stage, Film & Television Actress

Joan O’Hara, Irish stage, film and television actress, dies in Dublin on July 23, 2007. She is one of Ireland’s most popular actresses and is, at the time of her death, recognisable to television viewers as Eunice Dunstan, a gossip in Fair City on RTÉ One.

O’Hara is born in Rosses Point, County Sligo, on October 10, 1930, the daughter of Major John Charles O’Hara, an officer in the British Corps of Royal Engineers and his wife, Mai (née Kirwan). One of her sisters, Mary (born 1935), is a soprano/harpist. Her brother Dermot (born 1934) now lives with his family in Canada. She attends the same Ursuline convent school as fellow actress and friend Pauline Flanagan.

O’Hara lives most of her life in Monkstown, Dublin, with a stay in London, with her husband, the poet and architect Francis J. Barry. The couple has four children: Siubhan, Jane, Guy, and Sebastian, an author/playwright, whose works include The Steward of Christendom, and the Booker-shortlisted novels A Long Long Way and The Secret Scripture. She is also a year-round sea-swimmer.

O’Hara is a member of the renowned Abbey Players and performs in many plays in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, including those by Seán O’Casey, Lady Gregory and W.B. Yeats. She appears as Maurya in the 1988 film The Dawning. She appears in a number of other films, including Ron Howard‘s Far and Away, Da, Footfalls, Home is the Hero and just before her death, How About You. In this her final film, she stars with Vanessa Redgrave and her friend Brenda Fricker. The strength of her performance and bravery in carrying it out is acknowledged by the cast and crew in a standing ovation.

More recently, O’Hara is best known for appearing in the popular Irish television soap opera Fair City, broadcast on RTÉ One. She joins the soap in 1994, portraying the character Eunice Dunstan until her death in 2007. Thus, she is described as both one of Ireland’s most popular actresses and as one of the finest actors of her generation on her death. She admires in particular Samuel Beckett, Federico García Lorca and Ingmar Bergman. While she takes a no-nonsense approach to her craft, famously giving the advice that when in doubt, one should relate to the fireplace, she is educated at the Abbey School of Acting and has a deep appreciation and knowledge of theoretical approaches to acting and is an admirer of the European and American avant-garde. As actor Alan Stanford says after her death, “She had the most amazing energy. She was in the truest sense one of the last of the greats.”

Joan O’Hara Barry (she keeps her maiden name as her stage name) dies in Dublin on July 23, 2007, of complications from heart disease, aged 76. Her death is announced on RTÉ News the following day.


by Leave a comment

Birth of Banjo Player Gerry O’Connor

Gerry O’Connor, traditional tenor banjo player, is born on July 21, 1960, in Nenagh, County Tipperary. As Earl Hitchener, music critic for The Wall Street Journal, says, O’Connor can be considered at the moment “the single best four-string banjoist in the history of Irish Music.” He also plays mandolin, fiddle, guitar and tenor guitar.

O’Connor releases four solo albums and his third one, titled No Place Like Home, is named by The Irish Times as Number 1 Traditional/Folk album of the year in 2004. After the sudden death of banjo player Barney McKenna on April 5, 2012, he joins The Dubliners to complete their planned tour, until the final shows at Vicar Street in Dublin, on December 28-30. McKenna himself says about Gerry O’Connor: “He’s my best pupil ever.” Together with Eamonn Campbell, Patsy Watchorn and Seán Cannon, O’Connor keeps touring in 2013 as The Dublin Legends.

In addition to his solo performances and recordings, O’Connor is a member of Four Men and a Dog. He also works on Michael Flatley‘s Lord of the Dance soundtrack and guests over the years with many famous Irish artists such as The Waterboys, Mary Black, Arcady, Moya Brennan, Luka Bloom, Sharon Shannon and performs for U.S. President Bill Clinton in Belfast during his historic visit to Ireland. More recently he guests on Christy Moore‘s album Folk Tale (2011).

O’Connor is one of four musicians brought together by blues rock singer/guitar player Joe Bonamassa to perform on a variety of instruments in an acoustic concert at the Vienna State Opera on July 3, 2012. None of the five had ever worked together nor even met until they arrive in Vienna, where three days later they put on a live performance. The event is released on March 12, 2013, on CD and DVD/Blu-Ray, titled An Acoustic Evening At The Vienna Opera House, and in 2014 is broadcast as a PBS special.

O’Connor mainly plays CGDA tuned tenor banjo, instead of the usual Irish tuning GDAE. He plays a David Boyle banjo on almost every tour since 1996, but usually records with an Epiphone Recording A banjo.