Bridie Gallagher greeted by Daniel O'Donnell in 2000.

Singer Bridie Gallagher was born on September 7, 1924, in Creeslough, Co Donegal, the second youngest of ten children. Her father James was from Ards and her mother, Bridget Sweeney, who played the melodeon, was  from Creeslough. She was educated at Massinass national school and started her singing in the Creeslough Hall with a local ceili band formed by Bill Gallagher.
She shot to fame in 1956 with her recording of A Mother’s Love’s A Blessing and achieved international acclaim with her rendition of  The Boys From County Armagh. During her career, which spanned six decades, she appeared in many leading venues across the globe. She also made songs such as The Homes of Donegal famous.
She was spotted in the 1950s by Billy Livingstone who was a talent scout for Decca records, and she moved to Belfast, which she made home. She married George Livingstone (no relation) and had two boys, Jim and Peter. One son, Peter, died at the age of 21 in a motor accident in 1976 while Jim was to later tour with her. “She never really got over that (accident),” said Jim, “but she just kept going.”
She held the record for the largest number of people in attendance in the Albert Hall London, a record that was never equalled as it went on to be come an all-seater venue. She toured North America, Europe, Australia and was known as “The Girl from Donegal”. As well as the Albert Hall, she sang in the Sydney Opera House and Carnegie Hall in New York.”She brought glamour to the Irish stage, she dressed like an international star and that was unheard of in Ireland at that time,” said Dec Cluskey of the Bachelors.
Bridie Gallagher had her own radio show on RTÉ and appearaned on television on RTE, BBC, UTV, and coast to coast in the United States. However endless touring took its toll and her marriage eventually broke-up – a fact she hid from the public for many years.
She was honoured by the people of Creeslough in July 2000 with an event to celebrate her career. Members of her family from Creeslough and Donegal attended along with her two sisters and their families who travelled from Glasgow to be there, plus 2,500 fans. A plaque in her honour was unveiled. Although she never officially retired, she gave her last performance in Letterkenny in 2000.
Bridie Gallagher’s death came just a few weeks after UTV broadcast a tribute show, on December 18, 2011. Her granddaughter Teresa Livingstone was involved in making the UTV programme. “The most significant part of the journey for me was meeting with her fans in New York who could recall the details of her performances over 50 years later.
“The stories of Irish immigrants and how important her music had been to so many were quite overwhelming to listen to first-hand,” she said.
Daniel O’Donnell said of her: “I always say Bridie was the first from Donegal to pave the way for all of us that came after.
He added: “And I would say anyone that you would talk to of the Donegal singers would say that, because coming from Creeslough, or coming from where I come from, it’s a world away from where we ended up.”
Bridie Gallagher suffered a fractured hip after a fall before Christmas and died at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast, after succumbing to pneumonia, on January 9, 2012, aged 87.

John de Courcy Ireland was born on October 11, 1911, in the Indian city of Lucknow, the son of a British army major from Co Kildare. His father died of fever in China when John was very young. His mother continued to live in Beijing for several years, but John was sent back to England, to Marlborough College.

John de Courcy Ireland

Just before his 17th birthday he ran away to sea, serving as a deckhand on a Dutch vessel sailing to South America. He consented to return to read History and Spanish at New College, Oxford, which offered him a scholarship. After Oxford he and his wife Betty (Haigh, whom he married in 1933) spent time on the Aran Islands and in Co Donegal, where he mastered the Irish language.
In 1943 he was a founder of the Maritime Institute of Ireland, an educational charity first sited at Dún Laoghaire, and in 1959 of the Maritime Museum in Dún Laoghaire. He undertook research into Ireland’s maritime history and campaigned for recognition of the country’s maritime heritage.
In 1949 he taught at St Patrick’s Cathedral School in Dublin and the next year received his doctorate on the sea in education from Trinity College. In 1951 he moved to Drogheda Grammar School and subsequently taught at Bandon Grammar School, Co Cork, and from 1968 at Kingstown Grammar School, Dun Laoghaire, which was absorbed into Newpark Comprehensive school in Blackrock, where he stayed till 1986. There in 1983 he produced Ireland’s Sea Fisheries: A History, the first of a wide-ranging series of books on the sea.
Living in Dun Laoghaire, he become involved in running the lifeboat and became its secretary, directing its operations for more than a quarter of a century. Secretaryship of the Maritime Museum was combined with writing prolifically on the subject. Newspaper articles were followed by books. Topics included the seamen of Spain, Algeria and France, the maritime aspects of the 1916 Rising. In 1995 he published The Admiral from Mayo, a life of Admiral William Brown, the Irish-born founder of the Argentine navy. The governments of Argentina, China, France, Portugal and Spain granted him honours for his work, as did the British Maritime Museum at Greenwich.
He was also a political activist and with his wife was an early member of the Irish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and at the end of his life its president. He feared for the health of the seas and the potential disaster from nuclear fall-out that could ruin the water and do away with its potential as a source of clean renewable energy.
He also spoke French, Spanish, Italian, German, Serbo-Croat and Portuguese, and regretted that he could only read Norwegian. President Tito decorated him for his support for the Yugoslav resistance to wartime occupation. Post-war Yugoslavia was a “fascinating, non-aligned example of workable socialism,” according to John.
Betty, who had been a nurse in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, and he were supporters, at various times, of the Irish Labour Party, the Communist Party, the Democratic Socialist Party, the Democratic Left and latterly the Socialist Workers’ Party. He campaigned in favour of a continuance of Ireland’s neutrality and argued that all wars were crimes against humanity. They emphasised differences between peoples, he said, when to achieve a peaceful world, the common humanity of all people had to be emphasised.
Later he espoused the “two nations” approach to the North, joining Jim Kemmy’s Democratic Socialist Party, and in his 70s contesting an election in which he won 1,000 first preference votes.
John de Courcy Ireland was a director of the National Museum. In 1975 he was a founder member of the Irish-Chinese Cultural Society, keeping up the strong links with China which went back to his early childhood.
In 1996 he brought out The Sea and the Easter Rising and in 2001 History of Dún Laoghaire Harbour. He was active till the end of his life and celebrated his 90th birthday in Melilla, the Spanish possession on the coast of Morocco, where he was researching what seems to have been the world’s first organised lifeboat service.
John de Courcy Ireland died in Dublin on April 4, 2006. He was predeceased by Betty who died in 1999. They had a son and two daughters.

Tony Gregory

Tony Gregory was born in Ballybough in Dublin’s Northside on December 5, 1947. His mother was from County Offaly and father from Dublin. He was educated at the Christian Brothers at O’Connell School and University College, Dublin, from which he graduated with a BA degree. He became involved in republican politics joining Sinn Fein in 1966 and then siding with the Officials in the 1970 split within Sinn Féin. However he left the party in 1972 over the Official IRA ceasfire. He was briefly a member of Seamus Costello’s IRSP, but left after Costello’s assasination in 1977. He was then briefly involved with the Socialist Labour Party.
Tony Gregory worked as a secondary school teacher at Colaiste Eoin, an Irish language secondary school in Booterstown, where he taught History and French, before becoming involved in politics as a member of Dublin City Council in 1979. He was elected to Dáil Éireann as an Independent TD in the 1982 general election.
On his election he immediately achieved national prominence through the famous “Gregory Deal”, which he negotiated with Fianna Fail leader Charles Haughey. In return for supporting Haughey as Taoiseach, Tony Gregory was guaranteed a massive cash injection for his badly run down, inner-city Dublin constituency.
The written agreement included commitments to nationalise a 27-acre site at Dublin Port. A total of £4 million was to be allocated to employ 500 extra people in the inner city, while 3,746 jobs were to be created over three years. State funding would be provided to build 440 new houses in the constituency and another 1,600 in the rest of Dublin. It also included the dropping of a proposed eastern motorway bypass for the city. The whole deal was worth an estimated £100 million at the time in comparison to the £850,000 deal offered by Fine Gael leader Garret FitzGearld.
Although he was reviled in certain quarters for political horse trading, his uncompromising commitment to the poor was widely admired. Fianna Fáil lost power in the November 1982 general election, and a lot of the promises made in the Gregory Deal were reneged upon by the incoming Fine Gael-Labour Party coalition.
Tony Gregory continued to campaign on local issues and issues of social justice, particularly the drugs problem. He used his local knowledge to press politicians and the Gardai to take more effective action. He showed personal courage in naming and confronting local pushers at angry and emotional community meetings.
In 2004, four years before the collapse of Anglo Irish Bank, he raised in the Dail the conflict of interest of dual membership of the board of Anglo and the Dublin Docklands Development Authority.
In 1986 he spent two weeks in Mountjoy jail for refusing to sign a bond to keep the peace arising from protest activities during a campaign in support of inner city traders.
He remained a TD from 1982 and was one of the country’s most recognised Dáil deputies. Long before Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary introduced the practice into the higher rungs of the business ladder, he always refused to wear a tie in the Dáil chamber, stating that many of his constituents could not afford them.
He died on January 2, 2009, following a long struggle with cancer. His election agent, Maureen O’Sullivan, won his seat in the June 2009 by-election.
Tony Gregory: The Biography of a True Irish Political Legend, by Robbie Gilligan, was published O’Brien Press in 2011.

Golfer Philomena Garvey was born on April 26, 1927, in Baltray, Co Louth, daughter of James and Kathleen Garvey (née Owens). She dominated Irish women’s golf for a period of 25 years after the Second World War, winning the Close Championship a record 15 times, starting at Lahinch in 1946. This was a particularly notable occasion for the Baltray club in that the runner-up, Clarrie Reddan, was also a member.
An indication of her dominance of Irish golf is that she never lost a final, which meant the only hope her rivals had of a breakthrough was that she would be beaten unexpectedly in one of the earlier rounds. Her greatest sequence of Irish Championship triumphs was four in a row, from 1957 to 1960, though she had earlier completed hat-trick successes in 1948 and 1955.
A fine and powerful striker of the ball with both woods and irons, she was one of the few top women golfers of her time to use the inter-lock grip.
She became a controversial figure in 1958 when informing the organisers of the biennial British and Irish Curtis Cup team that she would not wear the Union Jack emblem on her blazer. This became a serious issue, not least for the fact that she had been a member of every team from 1948 until 1956  and had captured the British Ladies Championship in 1957.
By way of compromise, she offered to wear the old badge which incorporated the emblems of the four home countries, but the Ladies Golf Union (LGU) refused to budge on the issue. So the Union Jack was retained and Philomena Garvey didn’t play. But she had made her point and when she was chosen again on the Curtis Cup side in 1960, the badge was changed.
In sharp contrast to her Irish exploits, she had to endure near-misses in the British Championship in which she lost five finals. Of these, the 1960 decider was especially memorable. Against the American Barbara McIntyre she came from eight down to cover the next six holes in a stunning 20 strokes, winning five of them before eventually losing by 4 and 2.
A lifetime member of Co Louth GC, she lived close by in Termonfeckin. She was employed for most of her working life in the sports department of Clerys in O’Connell Street, Dublin.
Though she flirted with professional ranks from 1964, she regained her amateur status in 1968 and won her last Irish Championship two years later. She has been described by the golf writer Dermot Gilleece as “quite simply, the greatest woman golfer this country has produced”.
Philomena Garvey died on May 5, 2009, aged 82.
Biography
Philomena Garvey: Queen of the Irish Fairways, by Paul Garvey, The Liffey Press. ISBN 978-1-905785-71-1

Conor Cruise O’Brien was born on November 3, 1917, in Rathmines, Dublin. He was the only child of Francis Cruise O’Brien, a journalist who worked for the Freeman’s Journal and later the Irish Independent, and Kathleen Sheehy, a teacher, feminist, pacifist and author of a book on Irish grammar. She had three sisters, all of whom lost their husbands in 1916. These included Hanna, wife of murdered pacifist Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, and Mary, wife of Thomas Kettle, an officer of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers who died during the Battle of the Somme. His father died when Conor was ten, so the dominant influence was his strong-minded mother.

Conor Cruise O'Brien

Although his father was an agnostic, Conor Cruise O’Brien’s first school was Muckross College, a Catholic convent school. Later he went to Sandford Park, nominally secular but in effect imbued with the Protestant ethos. His mother’s influence had made him fluent in Irish, and he won a sizarship to study Irish and French at Trinity College, Dublin. He was a brilliant student and won a scholarship at the end of his first year, which brought an allowance of £30 a year and rooms in the college – a coveted privilege – at half price. His roommate was Vivian Mercier, later a professor of English literature and author of books about Samuel Beckett and the Irish comic tradition.
After his mother’s death in 1938, he supported himself by giving grinds and by dabbling in journalism. Meanwhile, he kept winning prizes. He was active in the college debating society, edited the college magazine, and joined the Fabian Society and the Labour Party. In his final year, 1939, he married Christine Foster, a headmaster’s daughter from a liberal Belfast Presbyterian family. He graduated with a first in history.
Remarkably, he failed the Civil Service entrance exam, but passed on his second attempt in 1942. He joined the Department of Finance for two years before moving to  External (now Foreign) Affairs. In view of his later stances on Northern Ireland and republicanism, ironically he worked on the Government’s campaign against Partition. Meanwhile, he tried his hand at writing poetry, which was tactfully rejected by Sean O’Faolain, editor of The Bell magazine. But he soon made his mark as a critic and commentator.
When the Government decided to set up the Irish News Agency, he became its first managing director, staying for the seven years. Under the Coalition government that replaced De Valera’s Fianna Fail, he was sent as a counselor to the Irish embassy in Paris.
With the return to power of Fianna Fail, Conor Cruise O’Brien for a time had a good working relationship with the veteran Minister for External Affairs, Frank Aiken. Ireland by now was playing an active and vocal role in the UN Assembly, and Cruise O’Brien was generally credited with being one of the people who formulated its policies – which included bringing on to the agenda China’s admission to the UN, much to the annoyance of the USA.
Conor Cruise O’Brien was in his 40s when he entered into the most fateful and controversial chapter of his life – his posting to the Congo by the direct initiative of Dag Hammerskjold, then secretary-general of the UN. He arrived in Elizabethville, the capital of Katanga province, in June 1961 to find himself in the epicentre of an international hotbed. The secession of Katanga, the murder of the first prime minister Patrice Lumumba (often ascribed to European-paid mercenaries), the dubious role of Union Minière, made the front pages of the world press for months on end. In the end Cruise O’Brien, apparently acting on what he thought was a UN resolution, ordered the UN peacekeeping force into action against the mercenaries and against Katanga’s secession.
He had stirred up a hornets’ nest internationally. One of the most vocal critics was Paul-Henri Spaak, then Belgian Foreign Minister and now remembered as an architect of European unity. “Who is Conor Cruise O’Brien?” asked Harold Macmillan, and answered his own question: “An unimportant, expendable man.” Pressures on him, on the UN and on the Irish Government multiplied. Hammarskjold was forced to desert his protege, then died in a plane crash and his successor, U Thant, formally agreed to a request from Frank Aiken that Cruise O’Brien be released from further UN duty. Almost immediately, he announced his resignation from the Civil Service.
The controversy continued when he later published his version of events in the book To Katanga and Back (1962). Meanwhile, he divorced his wife and married the poet Maire Mhac an tSaoi, daughter of Sean McEntee, a Fianna Fail Cabinet Minister. They adopted two Congolese children.
The Congo chapter had earned him one important admirer – President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, who invited him to become vice-chancellor of the university there. For a time this relationship went well, but the two drifted apart and Cruise O’Brien – never a man to stay silent long – was occasionally outspoken about what he felt were local breaches in civil rights and free speech. Nkrumah, becoming somewhat paranoid after an assassination attempt, deported several of Cruise O’Brien’s European colleagues at the university. After an interval, Cruise O’Brien followed them voluntarily, becoming Albert Schweitzer professor of humanities at New York University.
There he became a vocal critic of the Vietnam war, attending protest marches. In one, he was kicked by a policeman, and was in considerable pain for days afterwards. During this period, his play Murderous Angels was staged in Los Angeles and later had a brief run in New York.

Eventually he returned to Ireland, where there had been a swing to the left politically, and stood as a Labour candidate in Dublin North East. Unexpectedly, he won a big vote and became embroiled with his bete noire, Charles Haughey, about whom he later coined the word Gubu – standing for “grotesque, unusual, bizarre and unprecedented”. He attacked Haughey over his role in the Arms Crisis, in which certain Fianna Fail politicians were alleged to have tried to smuggle arms shipments to nationalists in the North.
He became Minister for Posts and Telegraphs (1973-77) in the Fine Gael-Labour coalition government. His anti-republican line resulted in the amendment to Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act that virtually denied active or even strongly vocal republicans access to radio or TV channels. The section has since been repealed. Cruise O’Brien believed that there was too much sympathy for Sinn Fein in RTE in particular. His stated view was: “If the Provos are successful, there will be civil war into which the South will be drawn.”
He became the Labour Party’s spokesman on the North. To many, his attitude seemed anti-nationalist, maintaining that his stance made things harder rather than easier for men such as John Hume, who was striving to maintain a moderately nationalist line, as an alternative to IRA violence. When told that his pronouncements – widely reported at home and abroad – were close to official London policy, O’Brien retorted: “Yes, I am pro-British. I am also pro-French and pro-American. I am even pro-Russian in that I am pro the Russian people. But I am more pro-Irish than I am any of these things. Ireland is my country, and I am just as Irish as any bloody IRA man.”
Time was running out for the coalition, and in the 1977 election Fianna Fail came back to power and Cruise O’Brien lost his seat. He was elected by Trinity College graduates to the Seanad (from 1977 to 1979), before getting the job as editor-in-chief of The Observer in London, to which he was appointed in 1978. The following year he received Granada TV’s columnist of the year award for his journalism and in 1984 he won the Channel 4 What the Papers Say award for his work for the Irish Times and The Observer. Of his career as a politician, he said that his election defeat had liberated him from the necessity of saying things he did not believe: “It sickened me, and I am glad to get out of it.”
In 1987 he was embroiled in controversy again, this time as a result of a visit to South Africa, where his lectures at the University of Cape Town angered black students. However, as his writings show, Cruise O’Brien was no friend to racial policies, and his 1986 book on Israel, The Siege, was characteristically independent in its viewpoint.
Of his later writings, undoubtedly his most important book was the biography of Edmund Burke, The Great Melody – a phrase borrowed from Yeats. A degree of autobiographical self-identification with Burke was noticed by several commentators.
He continued to denounce nationalism vehemently: “Nationalism everywhere tends to be xenophobic.” He also attacked the “insidious and demoralising peace process” in the North, and he shocked some of his liberal followers by canvassing for Robert McCartney of United Kingdom Unionist Party in North Down.
He was a long time columnist for the Irish Times and later the Irish Independent and his articles were distinguished by hostility to the peace process in Northern Ireland, regular predictions of civil war in the Republic and a pro-Unionist stance. In 1997, a successful libel action was brought against him by relatives of Bloody Sunday victims for alleging in one article that the marchers were “Sinn Féin activists operating for the IRA”. In 1963, his script for a Telefís Éireann programme on Charles Stewart Parnell won him a Jacob’s Award
With his family he lived Howth, County Dublin. In 1992 he told Fergus Pyle of the Irish Times: “I have never spent an entire year away from Ireland. In every year of my life I have been able to come back here for some part of the summer – what the lawyers call the animus revertandi. It is quite strong.”
Many still believe that Conor Cruise O’Brien was at his best as an academic historian, and that the book Parnell and his Party, which grew out of a student thesis, is his most valuable work. A Concise History of Ireland, published in 1972 under the joint names of himself and Maire Mac An tSaoi, has gone through several editions. His essays and occasional pieces also contain some excellent literary criticism, without the contemporary polemics that intrude into so much of what he wrote and said.
Conor Cruise O’Brien was a maverick, both as a writer and politician. Some analysts viewed him as a fine intellectual led astray into public life by ambition and the desire to prove himself a man of action. Others saw him as a courageous radical nonconformist who challenged the forces of obscurantism. Others again argue that, like Burke, he began as a Whig radical and ended up as almost a reactionary.
Conor Cruise O’Brien had a son and two daughters (one of whom, Kate, a writer, predeceased him) by his first marriage, and adopted a son, Patrick, and a daughter, Margaret, with Maire Mhac an tSaoi.
He died in Howth on December 18, 2008

Historian RB (Robert Brendan) McDowell was born in Belfast on September14, 1913, the eldest of two sons. His father was a tea merchant. He was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institute. He entered Trinity College, Dublin, to read history and political science in 1932 and graduated with honours in 1936. When a PhD was conferred on him three years later, he was required to read his final degree papers aloud to the examiners as his writing was too difficult to decipher.
His politics, rooted in the context of the British Isles, remained unionist to the end.
As a student, he immersed himself in the work of Hobbes, Locke, Machiavelli, Rousseau, JS Mill and Marx. He had a particular liking for Lecky, and admired and enjoyed Marx as an economic historian. “I was influenced by the whole concept of the economic factor in history and was fascinated by class divisions.”
Three years spent working in Marsh’s Library, Dublin’s first public library, founded in 1701, were followed by teaching at Radley college, Oxfordshire. In 1945 he became a lecturer in the modern history department at TCD, and was elected a fellow in 1951.
Well-liked and a familiar sight at student parties, he also became well known at Hist debates. To students, he presented a highly contrasting impression of cheerful enthusiasm, youthful energy, approachability and earnestness. Many would not miss his lectures for the world, despite his inevitable late arrival and his tendency to forget his notes.
His style of dress made him instantly recognisable – a battered pork-pie hat, crumpled suit, shabby coat and long woollen scarf that were worn in all weathers. Small of stature, he had a high-pitched voice and a rapid-fire style of delivery. As he walked, jingling a bunch of keys, he could usually be heard muttering to himself. Giving lectures, his pyjama legs might peep out from under his trousers. He nevertheless managed to date some of the most attractive women in Trinity.
A compulsive newspaper reader, his rooms were described as “delightfully untidy”, with newspapers and books piled high everywhere, paintings stacked against the walls and coffee cups all over the floor. When he entertained, guests were served “mulled” wine (heated in a kettle) and given a seat beside the gas fire.
He was junior Dean of Students from 1956 – 69. His reputation for eccentricity convinced some students that he would be a soft touch. “They soon found out their mistake,” Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote. “McDowell was effortlessly and effectively tough as a disciplinarian where discipline was required, while otherwise being unfailingly helpful to the majority of undergraduates who behaved themselves appropriately.”
As part of his duties, he was required to collect students’ completed census forms. Spotting the reply “Lapsed Catholic” under the heading “Religion” on one form, he asked, “What’s this, what’s this? The officials don’t want to know your spiritual odyssey, young man, they want to know what you are now.”
In the early 1960s he appeared regularly on Telefís Éireann as a member of the Postbag panel, answering viewers’ questions. He was an outstanding after-dinner speaker.
In the 1980s he lived in London, where his life centred upon five institutions – three clubs (one a night club), the Institute of Historical Research and the London Library. He joined the Conservative party and helped out in the 1992 election campaign. On turning 90 he decided to return to Dublin.
He was widely travelled, often holidaying on the Continent as a guest of former students. One graduate remembered driving him to Monte Carlo and watching him climbing the steps of the Grand Hotel in pork-pie hat and coat, fully expecting to see him being refused entry. Towards the end of his life many of his friends contributed to two books in his honour, The Junior Dean: Encounters with a Legend and The Magnificent McDowell: Trinity in the Golden Era.
He coxed a Staff Four to victory at Trinity Regatta in 1952 on the one occasion that he took to the water, and regularly attended the club’s “often pretty wild social occasions”, which he always seemed to enjoy.
But he also enjoyed more formal occasions.At a reception in the Provost’s House, during the Hist’s bicentenary after Senator Edward Kennedy had made a televised speech from the Examination Hall, Kennedy’s then wife Joan asked why academic staff members were on the platform and she was not. “Madam,” he replied, “it is a simple case of having been around for four hundred years.”
He was appointed Erasmus Smith’s professor of oratory and history in 1980. His publications include: Irish Public Opinion 1750-1800 (1944); Ireland in the Age of Imperialism and Revolution (1975); The Fate of the Ulster Unionists (1997); Crisis and Decline: The Fate of the Southern Unionists (1997); and Historical Essays 1938-2001: A McDowell Miscellany (2004) .
RB McDowell died on August 28, 2011, aged 97.

Singer Bernadette Greevy was born in Clontarf, Dublin, on July 3, 1940. She was educated there at the Holy Faith convent. Her vocal studies were in Dublin with Jean Nolan and at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, in London, with Helene Isepp.
Her first operatic appearance was in Dublin, aged 18, as Siebel in Gounod’s Faust; this was followed by her professional debut in 1961 as Maddalena in the Dublin Grand Opera Society’s Rigoletto.
At the 1962 Wexford Festival, she took the role of Beppe in Mascagni’s comedy L’Amico Fritz, thus initiating a happy association with the festival that saw her in such roles as Federica in Verdi’s Luisa Miller (1970), the formidable Hérodiade in Massenet’s opera of that name (1977), Medoro in Handel’s Orlando (1980) – a role she recorded to acclaim – Costanza in Haydn’s L’Isola Disabitata (1982) and the title role of Ariodante (1985).
Some felt she could have worked on her acting. “Her undeveloped thespian skills were to be commented on more than once”, stated her obituary in The Guardian. “Her Anna in Berlioz’s Les Troyens for Scottish Opera (1969), for example, was said to be ‘imposing’ but dramatically unconvincing. This was undoubtedly one of the chief reasons that Greevy’s operatic career failed to blossom abroad. Her Covent Garden debut did not take place until 1982, when she sang Geneviève in Pelléas et Mélisande, and although other significant roles were to follow in houses around the world – Britten’s Lucretia, Gluck’s Orfeo, Eboli in Don Carlos, Azucena in Il Trovatore among them – her career was defined by concerts and recitals.”
She was to be heard at her finest and most characteristic in works such as Elgar’s Sea Pictures, recorded successfully with Vernon Handley and the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1981.
Another well-received recording was that of Mahler songs (Songs of a Wayfaring Lad, Rückert Lieder and Kindertotenlieder) with the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland and János Fürst for Naxos. Both the power of her instrument and a disarmingly genial quality were demonstrated here by Bernadette Greevy, who deployed a seamless legato line and admirable tonal control to achieve moments of searing intensity. Mahler was something of a speciality for her, and she sang on many occasions Das Lied von der Erde at performances of Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet at Covent Garden.
Passionate about fostering young Irish talent, she fought to establish the Anna Livia International Opera Festival in Dublin, of which she became the artistic director, in 2000. Her many honours included the Harriet Cohen international music award for outstanding artistry, the Order of Merit of Malta, honorary doctorates from the National University of Ireland and Trinity College, Dublin, and the papal cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice conferred by the Holy See. She was acclaimed as one of the finest mezzos of her generation, having lifted her range from the original contralto.
In her later years, she gave the benefit of her long experience to a new generation of singers with an annual series of masterclasses conducted at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
Bernadette Greevy died on September 26, 2008. She is survived by her son, Hugh. Her husband, Peter Tattan, died in 1983. In line with her wishes, she was given a private burial before any public announement was made.

Playwright Hugh Leonard was born John Joseph Byrne in Dublin on November 9, 1926; his mother immediately giving him up for adoption. Later in life he changed his name to Hugh Leonard, but he was always known as Jack. Though deeply affected after discovering his background, he nevertheless made light of it. Of his mother, he said: “She never said a word to my father about the adoption. A few years later she did the exact same thing with a dog, and didn’t consult my father that time either. The dog’s name was Jack too, which made for some confusion.”
Although he eventually found his mother, he was unable to bring himself to approach her and she died without meeting him.
Leonard was raised as Jack Keyes by his adoptive parents, and educated at the Harold Boys’ School at Glasthule, Co Dublin, winning a scholarship to the local Presentation College.
Fascinated by the cinema and film-making, Hugh Leonard worked as an extra in the Agincourt scenes of Olivier’s Henry V, which were shot in Ireland in 1944. “I can pick myself out, drowning in a French swamp,” he recalled. “We were paid £4 a day; but if you had a horse, it was paid £8.”
After a stint as an office boy at Columbia Pictures’s Dublin office, he got a temporary civil service job. During his 14 years there he wrote a play, Nightingale in the Branches, which was presented by Lancos, the civil service dramatic society.
His first theatre play was The Big Birthday, produced at the Abbey in 1956, which was followed by A Leap in the Dark (1957), and Madigan’s Lock (1958), after which he left the civil service and became a full-time writer. Moving to London, he became a script editor for Granada Television. He adapted several books for BBC Television, including Dickens’s Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities. He also wrote the script for the film of Bernard Shaw’s Great Catherine (1968), which starred Peter O’Toole.
Stephen D (1962), a skilful conflation of two James Joyce works, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Stephen Hero, made him a name to reckon with at the Dublin Theatre Festival, alongside his fellow dramatists Brian Friel, Tom Murphy and John B Keane. Bernard Levin said that Stephen D really took us inside Joyce’s mind and “the excitement, passion and colour of so great a mind are fine things to be among.”
More plays and television work were followed by The Patrick Pearse Motel (1971) at the Gaiety in Dublin, opening one month after the IRA killed the first British soldier in Northern Ireland. Set in Dublin’s vodka-and-bitter-lemon belt, the comedy resonated as a Feydeau-esque farce, an attack on the Irish nouveau riche and as a metaphor for the new heritage-conscious tourist industry, with its bedrooms named after patriots and its ageing caretaker, Hoolihan, obliquely flying the flag as a veteran of the Easter Rising.
His most successful play, Da, reached Broadway at the tail end of the 1977-78 season and won Tonys for best play, best director (Melvin Bernhardt), best featured actor (Lester Rawlins) and, perhaps most famously, best actor: It was a career-making performance in the title role for Barnard Hughes, who went on to star in the movie version, with Martin Sheen.

Shortly before the play opened on Broadway, Mr. Leonard said in an interview with The New York Times that it is “pretty nearly totally autobiographical.” The title character was based on his own his own adoptive da, a man named Nicholas Keyes who worked as gardener for a wealthy Dublin family.
Two other plays reached Broadway: The Au Pair Man, a semi-allegorical tale about relations between England and Ireland, and A Life, which fleshed out a minor character from Da, a curmudgeon named Drumm, who reveres grammar and punctuality but does not care for people much.
As a fixture of the Dublin Theatre Festival for many years, and the literary manager of the Abbey for a short time (1976-77),  Hugh Leonard had become one of the city’s most notable artistic figures. He enjoyed flaunting his financial success, but was also keen to live close to his childhood home. He bought a large mansion in Killiney, and drove a Rolls-Royce, which was repeatedly vandalised. The tranquillity of his home was shattered by noise from a disco in a newly-opened neighbouring hotel, prompting a prolonged legal battle.
Moving to a more secure apartment block, and driving an anonymous Toyota, he contented himself with a fine collection of pictures, including some Lowrys.

However, his comfortable middle age was upset when his accountant and trusted friend, Russell Murphy, embezzled and spent more than £2 million of his theatrical clients’ money, including £258,000 belonging to Leonard. Gay Byrne was another of his victims. Particularly galling was the revelation that Murphy’s extravagance had included taking large parties of clients and friends to the theatre, sometimes occupying the more expensive seats at Leonard’s own plays.
He resented what he saw as his exclusion from the Irish arts world. The trouble with Ireland, he said, was that it was “a country full of genius, but with absolutely no talent”. His critics were equally forthright about his ego.
Hugh Leonard retorted in kind. He eagerly debunked other famous names, including Brendan Behan, who, he said, owed all his success to Joan Littlewood’s editing. This critique was later extended to others of the Behan tribe. Brian Behan was, he said, similar to Salman Rushdie in that, given the quality of his writing, his life could be in danger if he did not disappear. Behan replied that Leonard had no enemies in Dublin. “It is his friends who hate him”, he said.
His prickly and shy personality prompted him to imagine snubs and slights everywhere, and he was merciless in retribution. In Home Before Night, his memoir which later became Da, he recalled how he developed this art at school. “Being useless at fighting, I cultivated a skill at deadly insult.” On hearing that his long-time sparring partner Ulick O’Connor was in hospital, he remarked: “It must have been something he wrote”.
Hugh Leonard argued that “you can write a serious play through the medium of comedy, but in Ireland comedy seems to be suspect; if it is accessible it is deemed shallow. If your work is liked, something must be wrong; he’s not boring, so he must be slight.”
His other television work included adaptations of Flaubert, Dostoevsky and Emily Brontë, as well as Somerville and Large’s The Irish RM (1985). Films included Herself Surprised (1977), Da (1984), and Widow’s Peak (1994). As well as two volumes of autobiography he wrote a memoir Rover and other Cats (1990) and a novel The Offshore Island (1993). He wrote a regular column for the Sunday Independent.
He married Paule Jacquet in 1955. After her death he married Kathy Hayes, who survives him, along with his daughter Danielle from his first marriage.
Hugh Leonard (John Keyes Byrne) died on February 12, 2009.

Author James Plunkett Kelly was born in Dublin on May 21, 1920, the son of a chauffeur. His middle name, from St Oliver Plunkett, was imposed by an enthusiastic parish priest
He was educated by the Christian Brothers at Synge Street and at Dublin Municipal School of Music, where he studied the violin and viola; he also played Gaelic football to provincial level. His father died early, and young James found himself the family’s breadwinner. He worked intermittently as a musician, but then took a job as a clerk at the Dublin Gas Company. It led him to join the Workers’ Union of Ireland at a time when trades unions were neither popular nor profitable, and in 1946 he became a branch organiser, reporting to Jim Larkin, and working in the next office.

James Plunkett Kelly

Using the nom-de-plume James Plunkett, he was already writing, mainly in The Bell, which had been publishing his short stories – beginning with The Mother – since the early 1940s. A collection published by Hutchinson in 1958 led to the commission for Strumpet City. Within a decade, he was also a prolific contributor to radio dramas and talks for Radio Eireann.
In 1955, he was pilloried by the Church – prompted by the Catholic Standard – after he paid a visit to the Soviet Union; he overcame calls for his dismissal, as did Jim Larkin, but voluntarily resigned later the same year. He then joined Radio Eireann as assistant head of drama; his own play Big Jim which, like Strumpet City, was set during the 1913 strike, provided the basis for The Risen People, which was produced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 1958.
After some time at the BBC, James Plunkett Kelly joined Telefis Eireann as a producer and director. He made his mark with a drama based on the rebellion of 1798, When Do You Die Friend?, and scripted Bird’s Eye View, a documentary which inspired The Gems She Wore: A Book of Irish Places (1972).
Strumpet City extends to 200,000 words, and the writing of it took James Plunkett Kelly ten years, working in the evenings while a producer at Telefis Eireann; during that period he spent much time doubting that he would ever finish the book. When all seemed lost, his conscience kept him going – he had received a £500 advance from Hutchinson in 1958.
Every Christmas came a card from Hutchinson’s managing director Robert Lusty, with a plaintive note: “How’s the novel coming along?” As the book grew, James Plunkett Kelly hardly dared reply, having become depressed that Hutchinson would turn it down as being too long.
He need not have worried. By the time the hardback came out in May 1969, the book had earned him £100,000 from the sale of foreign and paperback rights, then a record sum. It was later filmed for RTE with Peter O’Toole, Donal McCann and Cyril Cusack.
Despite the success of Strumpet City, he continued with his day job in broadcasting, but associated with writers rather than television personalities. Once, with O’Casey, he went to visit Brian O’Nolan, who wrote under the names Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen. The pair found the writer sitting up in bed with a paperback of his novel  At Swim Two Birds, which he was copying into an exercise book. “I hear the American universities are paying great money for manuscripts,” O’Nolan explained.
He wrote two further novels: Farewell Companions (1977), set in the period following Strumpet City, and The Circus Animals (1990), which examined the Church during the years immediately after the Second World War.
He was one of the first drama directors with RTÉ Television a nd went on to be Executive Producer and Head of Features. He won two Jacob’s Awards, in 1965 and 1969, for his TV productions. He was a member of Aosdana. He remained a fine fiddle player and lived latterly at Kilmacanogue, near Bray, Co Wicklow.
James Plunkett Kelly died on May 28, 2003, aged 83. He had married Valerie Koblitz, who died in 1986. They had three sons, and a daughter who predeceased him.

Joe Dolan (centre) with the Drifters Showband in the 1970s

Singer Joe Dolan was born in Mullingar on October 16, 1939, the youngest of eight children. His father died when he was eight and his mother when he was 15. Educated at St Mary’s CBS, he served his time as a compositor at the printing works of the Westmeath Examiner.
He formed the Drifters Showband With his older brother Ben, playing guitar and singing. They perfected a  classic showband sound and in 1964, Joe cut his first record, a cover of Del Shannon’s The Answer to Everything; it reached No 4 in the Irish charts. Other hits followed, including Pretty Brown Eyes, Tar and Cement, The House with the Whitewashed Gable and the comedy number The Westmeath Bachelor.
In 1968 the Drifters split when most of the members left to form The Times showband. Joe and Ben Dolan recruited new musicians and over the years the line-up included exceptional talent such as champion accordionist Seamus Shannon, guitarist Jimmy Murray and drummer Tony Newman. In later years the band included two of Joe’s nephews.
He admiredthe original Irish showbands. “The shame,” he said, “is that a lot of these bands never recorded. The Clipper Carlton was a classic, classic, classic band . . . it’s a shame that now there is nothing there for you to listen to, to hear the brilliance of the musicianship.”
In 1969 he stormed into the British charts with Make Me an Island, reaching No 3, and subsequent international hits included Teresa, It Makes No Difference and Falling in Love .
In 1973 he teamed up with the Italian songwriter and producer Roberto Danova and established himself on the European pop scene. Sweet Little Rock ‘n’ Roller was the first of many hit records written by Danova and co-writer Peter Yellowstone. The collaboration resulted in further hits, including Lady in Blue, Sister Mary and Hush, Hush Maria .
The Drifters toured extensively. Joe Dolan appeared at venues across Europe and in 1978 toured the Soviet Union, one of the first western acts to do so. In the 1980s the band did several residencies in Las Vegas. He also entertained audiences in South Africa, Argentina, Brazil and Canada.
He never forgot his domestic audience though. When the dance halls closed he turned to cabaret. He had many fans among the Irish in Britain and played to full houses at venues such as the Buffalo Rooms, Camden Town, Gresham Ballroom, Holloway Road, and the Galtymore Ballroom in Cricklewood.
Early in his career he attracted a strong following in Belfast and played many Christmas night gigs at the King’s Hall. In Dublin he regularly played to capacity crowds at the Crystal and Ierne ballrooms and the Television Club.
The hits continued to roll out. More and More was followed by It’s You, It’s You, It’s You and Wait ’til the Clouds Roll By (Jenny). In the 1990s he set up his own record label, Gable Records, and built a recording studio in Mullingar. There he recorded the hit single Ciara and the album Can’t Give Enough. In 1997 his album Endless Magic entered the charts and he became the first Irish singer to have had top 10 hits in each decade from the 1960s to the 1990s.
In 1997 he rerecorded Good Looking Woman, which had been a hit in the early 1970s. This time around he was accompanied by Dustin the Turkey and the record topped the charts.
In 1998 the critically acclaimed Joe’s 90s was released. The album featured covers of songs by Blur, Oasis and Pulp, and Blur’s The Universal became a hit single. The album was marketed with some style and wit, the singer represented by a hand-puppet dressed in trademark white suit.
His follow-up album 21st Century Joe, featuring songs by David Bowie, U2, REM and Bruce Springsteen, was equally successful. Towards the end he recorded an album of classics from the swing era. While he lived in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock, he loved Mullingar and maintained a flat there.
“Joe had a unique style and a steely determination, and he worked very hard at his craft. He did everything hard actually — he partied hard, worked hard, and was hugely enthusiastic in his affection for his friends,” recallad long time friend Ronan Collins.
“Well, it’s up to me to be as good as I can,” Joe Dolan said in an interview with The Irish Times in 2002. “I never shirk on anything. Even if I’m tired and have had a hard day, that’s got nothing to do with the audience. You just have to perk yourself up and go for it. If I sense that people aren’t enjoying themselves, I don’t blame them; I blame me. Because I reckon that the point of the music is entertainment. They like to sit back, hear something that they’re going to like and have a bloody great time. I feel that if the people are not singing for me, then I’m doing something wrong. They used to call it send ‘em home sweatin’ but I call it send ‘em home happy.”
Joe Dolan died on December 26, 2007, aged 68. He is survived by his brothers Ben, Paddy and Vincent, sisters Dymphna and Imelda, nieces and nephews.

joedolan.com