Betty Ann Norton, Irish drama teacher and founder of the Betty Ann Norton Theatre School and actor agency, is born on July 5, 1936.
Norton grows up in Dublin near the South Circular Road. Her mother, Frances, plays the violin and her father, Eugene, is a baritone singer. Frances is a full-time homemaker while Eugene works as manager of the Bacon Shops on Grafton Street. One of two children, her younger brother, Jim Norton, also becomes a successful actor. She attends school at St. Louis High School, Rathmines.
Norton attends the Ena Mary Burke School of Drama and Elocution on Kildare Street, Dublin, where Hollywood starMaureen O’Hara had also trained. Her acting school offers an annual Ena Mary Burke scholarship in Burke’s honour.
Norton originally plans to become an actor, but her family does not approve and her mother encourages her to become a teacher. In 1959, she establishes the Betty Ann Norton Theatre School on Harcourt Street in Dublin. Her husband, Michael, is co-director of the school. According to Norton, changes to traffic by the new Luas tram system causes the business to change premises to her childhood school, St. Louis High School in Rathmines in 2006.
Norton meets her husband, Michael J. Cunneen, on the Aran Islands in 1965 and they marry in 1967. They lived in Dún Laoghaire. Michael dies in the Blackrock Clinic on May 12, 2017.
Katy Ellen French, Irish socialite, model, writer, television personality and charity worker, dies on December 6, 2007, in Navan, County Meath, after collapsing at a friend’s house on December 2. According to the BBC, “in the space of less than two years, she had become one of Ireland’s best-known models and socialites.” Her cause of death is given as hypoxic ischemic brain injury caused by cocaine and ephedrine.
French studies psychology and marketing before working for the Assets Modelling Agency and later writing articles for several Dublin magazines and newspapers. She represents Sony Ericsson and Suzuki among many other brands, becoming more famous in 2007 as a result of her fiancé, restaurateur Marcus Sweeney, ending their relationship in a very public fashion after she is photographed for a lingerie shoot for the Sunday Independent in his restaurant in January of that year. As a result of this publicity, her image appears more regularly in daily Irish tabloid newspapers, and she makes numerous television appearances on shows such as RTÉ‘s The Podge and Rodge Show in April 2007 and Tubridy Tonight a week before her death.
French is known for deliberately courting controversy to promote her career. On Tubridy Tonight she speaks of her appearance on Celebrities Go Wild as well as her relationship break up with Sweeney. Mention is also made of her birthday party which she is to celebrate the following week, having missed her birthday due to Celebrities Go Wild. Host Ryan Tubridy is invited to the event. Footage is shown of the charity single “Down in the Bog” which is to be released as a Christmas single. She works for several Irish charities including Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital, Crumlin and GOAL in Calcutta, India. She writes a column for Social & Personal magazine.
In an interview with Hot Press‘s Jason O’Toole, French says that she would consider having an abortion if she became pregnant during the peak of her career, a controversial statement in Ireland where abortion is at that time effectively illegal, and that she loves fur despite being a “massive animal lover.” She also airs her religious beliefs, being a member of the Church of England as well as a practising Catholic and speaks highly of Islam and her Muslim friends saying, “When you read the Koran, you realise that Islam is a beautiful religion.” In the same interview she is asked if she has ever used cocaine and denies ever having done so. In November 2007, she tells an Irish tabloid that she has used cocaine but has stopped. A week before she dies, she celebrates her 24th birthday with celebrity and media friends.
French dies on the evening of December 6, 2007, in Our Lady’s Hospital, Navan, County Meath, having collapsed at a house in Kilmessan, County Meath, in the early hours of Sunday, December 2. There is widespread speculation in the media that her death is the result of a drug overdose. A postmortem finds she has suffered brain damage, and that traces of cocaine are found in her body. A senior Garda states, “We strongly suspect that drugs contributed to her death. This was a previously healthy person being brought to hospital in a collapsed state.” In 2010 two people are charged with supplying cocaine to French and in failing to get medical assistance in a timely fashion. She is buried in her hometown of Enniskerry, County Wicklow, on December 10. TaoiseachBertie Ahern‘s aide de camp, Captain Michael Tracey, attends her funeral.
On November 13, 2012, two friends of French, Kieron Ducie and Ann Corcoran, plead guilty to possession of cocaine with intent to supply on the weekend of French’s death. Trim Circuit Court is told that a second charge against the pair is not being pursued, that they had intentionally or recklessly engaged in behaviour relating to the supply of cocaine to French and failed to get medical assistance in a timely fashion. In July 2013 the pair are sentenced to a 2-1⁄2 year suspended sentence and three-year good behaviour bond, and a two-year suspended sentence and two-year good behaviour bond respectively. At the verdict, French’s cause of death is given as hypoxic ischemic brain injury caused by cocaine and ephedrine.
Ewart-Biggs is 55 when he is killed by a land mine planted by the IRA on July 21, 1976. He had been taking precautions to avoid such an incident since coming to Dublin only two weeks earlier. Among the measures he employs is to vary his route many times a week however, at a vulnerable spot on the road connecting his residence to the main road, there is only a choice between left or right. He chooses right and approximately 150 yards from the residence he hits a land mine that is later judged to contain hundreds of pounds of explosives. Ewart-Biggs and fellow passenger and civil servant Judith Cooke (aged 26) are killed. Driver Brian O’Driscoll and third passenger Brian Cubbon (aged 57) are injured. Cubbon is the highest-ranking civil servant in Northern Ireland at the time.
The Irish government launches a manhunt involving 4,000 Gardaí and 2,000 soldiers. TaoiseachLiam Cosgrave declares that “this atrocity fills all decent Irish people with a sense of shame.” In London, Prime MinisterJames Callaghan condemns the assassins as a “common enemy whom we must destroy or be destroyed by.” Thirteen suspected members of the IRA are arrested during raids as the British and Irish governments attempt to apprehend the criminals, but no one is ever convicted of the killings. In 2006, released Foreign and Commonwealth Office files reveal that the Gardaí had matched a partial fingerprint at the scene to Martin Taylor, an IRA member suspected of gun running from the United States.
(Pictured: The twisted remains of the car lie upended beside a huge crater after the explosion that killed Christopher Ewart-Biggs and civil servant Judith Cooke)
The Central Bank of Ireland is Ireland’s central bank, and as such part of the European System of Central Banks (ESCB). It is also the country’s financial services regulator for most categories of financial firms. It is the issuer of Irish pound banknotes and coinage until the introduction of the euro currency and now provides this service for the European Central Bank.
The Central Bank, however, does not initially acquire many of the characteristics of a central bank:
It is not given custody of the cash reserves of the commercial banks
It has no statutory power to restrict credit, though it can promote it
The conditions for influencing credit through open-market operations does not yet exist
Ireland’s external monetary reserves are largely held as external assets of the commercial banks
The mid-1960s see the Bank take over the normal day-to-day operations of exchange control from the Department of Finance. The Central Bank broadens its activities over the decades, but it remains in effect a currency board until the 1970s.
Since January 1, 1972, the Central Bank has been the banker of the Government of Ireland in accordance with the Central Bank Act 1971, which can be seen in legislative terms as completing the long transition from a currency board to a fully functional central bank.
Its head office is located on Dame Street, Dublin, where the public may exchange non-current Irish coinage and currency, both pre- and post-decimalization, for euros. It also operates from premises in Spencer Dock, Iveagh Court, and College Green. The Currency Centre at Sandyford is the currency manufacture, warehouse, and distribution site of the bank.
By March 2017 its city centre staff moves to a new building at North Wall Quay.
seamus dubhghaill 