| News from Ireland
River Films
Successful Riverdance team takes on Hollywood
Moya Doherty and John McColgan, the couple who own Abhann, the company behind Riverdance: The Show, announced at the Cannes Film Festival that they would be moving into film production.
Together with Joan Egan, a director of Tyrone Productions, which produces Ireland’s Who Wants to be a Millionaire, they have set up River Films. Currently they have four film projects in development.
Things just keep getting better and better for this Irish couple who have shown the world that Irish dance is indeed rich. According to the Sunday Business Post, Tyrone Productions, the Dublin company, which is also owned by Doherty and McColgan, has reported a 35 percent increase in retained profits. Meanwhile, documents filed by Abhann Productions, which owns 65.5 percent of Riverdance, revealed that the show earned income totalling 45.6 million during the year 1999 alone!
Keep on dancing!
Alison Doody Is Back
Fifteen years after she starred in Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade with Harrison Ford, Alison Doody has again embraced the silver screen.
The Irish beauty, who is married to Gavin O’Reilly (Sir Anthony’ son) will be returning to the silver screen in King Solomon’s Mines, based on H. Rider Haggard’s adventure story.
Alison, who put her career on hold when she married Gavin and has been raising the couple’s two daughters, is said to be thrilled to be back in front of the camera.
Fans of Doody, whose co-star in King Solomon is Patrick Swayze, are hoping that with a reported fourth Indiana Jones under way, with Harrison Ford and Sir Sean Connery, she won’t go away again.
No Cows For Dublin
A collection of life-size cows designed by Irish artists had to be taken off the streets of Dublin in July after vandals destroyed several exhibits.
More than 70 cows were placed on the streets of Dublin and Dundalk as part of Bailey’s Cow Parade 2003, an international exhibition which visits cities all over the world. However, the first 10 cows placed in city-center locations were damaged so badly that organizers were forced to remove them.
"It’s so depressing, but not surprising," Amy Wallace, account executive of CowParade Ireland, told the Irish Independent. "The awful thing is, we were kind of expecting it in Dublin.
Meanwhile, also according to the Independent, a large fiberglass pig was stolen and damaged at the Galway Arts Festival.
FBI Head Visits Ireland
Robert S. Mueller III arrived in Ireland August 13 for a ten-day "private" visit. Much security and secrecy surrounded the visit, which started off with a round of golf at Lahinch Golf Club in Co. Clare. A regular golfing visitor to Ireland, Mueller was nominated by President Bush on September 4, 2001, becoming the sixth director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Ireland’s New Drinking & Smoking Laws
On January 1, Ireland is expected to become the first European country to ban smoking in pubs. Given that smoking and drinking are cherished traditions in the old sod, pundits are betting that it won’t happen. Minister for Health Micheál Martin, who proposed the new smoking rule, is facing increasing ire, not just from the public. Ireland’s environment minister Martin Cullen is hotly expressing his opposition to the plan and blaming it on the Americans.
“I hate the importation of this American political correctness into Ireland. I dislike it with a passion,” he grumpily observed. Of course, Cullen is reportedly a 40-a-day man, which we are sure does wonders for the environment.
Meanwhile, the Irish government is also trying to get the Irish population to cut back on alcohol consumption with strict new licensing laws.
Publicans will be fined e1,500 for serving drunks or
letting “intoxicated“ people into the bar or allowing fights or rows on the premises. Closing time on Thursdays will revert back to 11.30 p.m. Owners cannot offer any form of music or entertainment during the 30 minutes drinking-up time, and non-uniformed police are given greater powers to enforce the new laws.
Pubs who break the licensing laws could face temporary closure.
Golf is His Baby!
After considering withdrawing from the P.G.A. Champio-nship, Irish golfer Padraig Harrington decided to compete, leaving his wife Caroline at home about to go into labor. "The doctor was of the opinion that if anything, the pregnancy will go late," Harrington said. "I decided the worst thing was if I was sitting at home all the way through the P.G.A. and nothing happened. So we decided that I would travel," he told the New York Times.
"If I get the call Saturday and I’m doing well, I’m going to hang around on Sunday."
As it turned out, Padraig would have done as well to stay at home. Three bogies and no birdies in an uneventful final round left him with a total of ten over par and in a tie for 29th place. "It was one of those weeks. I just wasn't playing well enough to master the course, which was very tough but fair. There are no excuses. If you weren't at the top of your form, this was no place to be. I hope to play in the NEC this week if all goes well at home."
(No birth was reported at press time, a week after the P.G.A.).
Landmarks Saved and Sold
The site of the last stand by leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule, nicknamed Ireland’s Alamo, has won a last-minute reprieve. The house, in a run-down part of Dublin, had been earmarked for demolition to make way for a shopping center. It was where republican leaders held their last meeting before surrendering. After intense pressure from descendants of those who took part in the short-lived rebellion, which paved the way for eventual independence from Britain in 1921, the City Council voted to preserve the site.
Meanwhile, Lissadell House, the childhood home of Constance Gore-Booth, who as Countess Markiewicz was an important figure in the struggle for Irish independence, has been sold to a private couple.
The house in County Sligo, which was a favorite spot of William Butler Yeats and featured in many of his poems, was put on the market earlier this summer for $4.26 million. Sir Josslyn Gore-Booth said the new owners, who are Irish (but not the rock star Bono who viewed the house but did not buy it) would live at the house full time but still keep it open to the public.
And in another house story, Abbeville, former taoiseach Charles Haughey’s 320-acre estate in Kensealy was sold for e35 million in August. Manor Park Homebuilders who bought the estate, are betting on the land, currently in a "green belt," will be rezoned. When it is, there will be room for 2,000-plus houses in a highly desirable area.
Haughey, recently the subject of a tribunal, may have sold the estate to settle legal fees and his tax bill with the state.
The Sunday Tribune reported that Haughey, who is suffering from prostate cancer, will be allowed to live Abbeville for the rest of his life.
Booker Prize Nominee
Schopenhauer’s Telescope, the first novel by Irish Poet Gerard Donovan, has been announced as a selection for the prestigious Booker Prize. Donovan lives in Long Island, New York. His collection of poems, The LightHouse, was a nominee for the Irish Times Literature Prize. His short stories “Glass” and “A Crime About Martha” were finalists in the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Short Story Award (2000) and shortlisted for the Hennesy Award in Fiction, respectively.
Schopenhauer’s Telescope is published in the U.S. by Counterpoint and was a summer pick for Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers program.
The Irish in Space
Michelle McKeon (28), a Limerick based scientist, hopes to become Ireland’s first astronaut. A lecturer in environmental science at the Limerick Institute of Technology McKeon is spending a year at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida doing research for long distance space travel. She is there as part of the Discover Science team who are working in the high velocity Space Science and Technology training program. Developed by the Irish government, the Kennedy Space Center and the Florida Space Institute, the aim of the program is to encourage more people to study and consider a career in science.
McKeon, who is from Clara town, in Co. Offaly, saw her work take flight when a rocket launched in early August had on board a number of meteorological experiments prepared by the Irish team, which is made up of 12 young graduates, including Sara Brady, 22, another Offaly native.
Did You Know. . .
Ivan Magill, born in Larne, Co. Antrim in 1888, is acknowledged as a father of modern anesthesia. Magill, who started working with anesthetics at the end of the First World War, invented ingenious techniques that allowed patients (mostly soldiers needing reconstruction of shattered faces) to breathe during operations. Prior to this, anesthesia was as likely to be administered by a passing porter wielding a bottle and a rag, and there was a fine line between giving enough anesthetic to put them to sleep and giving them a fatal overdose.
Magill also developed a suction technique to clear phlegm from the lungs of TB patients, making lung surgery easier, and in the 1930s he invented the sophisticated breathing and anesthetic delivery system which made chest and heart operations possible.
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