Paul Funge was born in Gorey Co Wexford, in 1944, the son of Tom and Eileen Funge. He studied in Dublin under Sean Keating, Maurice McGonigal and John Kelly in the National College of Art and Design.

Paul Funge.

While a student in NCAD, he was awarded an Italian government scholarship to study in Florence and won many Royal Dublin Society Awards for painting.
He had his first one-man show during the Wexford Opera festival. Since then he has exhibited worldwide including Amsterdam, Santa Barbara, Sao Paolo, Murcia, Zamora, Madrid and in numerous places in Ireland.
Paul Funge had long been involved in art education. He taught in many schools including Clongowes Wood College, Newbridge College, National College of Art, University of California Santa Barbara (USA), Kunsthistorisch Instituut, Amsterdam, and was director of the Waterford School of Art. He was an Inspector for Art in the Department of Education for some years.
He was one of the prime movers of the art centre idea in Ireland as one of the founder directors in 1967 of the Project Arts Centre in Dublin, along with John Kelly, John Behan and Michael Warren, among others. He established the Gorey Arts Centre in 1970 and was on the board of directors of the Wexford Arts Centre. He was a founder of the Belltable Arts Centre in Limerick while being the Regional Arts Officer for the Mid-West. He ran the Gorey Arts Festival – a three week summer arts festival – for over 15 years. He also had a spell running the Wexford Arts Centre in Wexford Town.
He once wrote his basic thoughts about art down in his essay “A Perspective on Art”.
As an artist, Paul Funge was best known as a portrait painter. His sitters include U2′s Adam Clayton, Frank McGuinness, Colm Tobin, Seoirse Bodley as well as many ministers and academics.One of his most intriguing portraits is “The Abuela” a portrait of the grandmother of a friend of his in Zamora, which now belongs to the collection of the United Arts Club, Dublin, of which he was a member. Amongst other collections containing his paintings are DCU, Droichead Arts Centre, National Concert Hall, National Self-Portrait Collection, Fitzwilton Collection, R.T.C Athlone, Gate Theatre.
At an exhibition of portraits in 1991, Brian Fallon, then art critic for The Irish Times, described Funge as a “born handler of paint”. He was also a noted landscape painter. He exhibited at the RHA and the Oireachtas Independents (of which he was chairman 1979-1982)
Paul Funge died on February 21, 2011, aged 67, after a short illness. He was survived by his brothers Joe and Michael.

'Paul Funge, Bobby Ballagh and Friend,' oil on canvas by Paul Funge.

Irish novelist Edna O’Brien was born on December 15, 1930, in Tuamgraney, County Clare, to Michael O’Brien and Lena O’Brien (neé Cleary). She was educated at the primary school in Scariff, and, as a boarder (1941-46), at the Convent of Mercy, Loughrea, Co Galway. Her family was opposed to anything to do with literature and later she described her small village as “enclosed, fervid and bigoted”.
According to O’Brien, her mother was a strong, controlling woman who had emigrated temporarily to America and worked for some years as a maid in Brooklyn before returning to Ireland to raise a family. She has said that her father was an “angry drinker” and frequently caused herself and her mother to feel “in danger”.
After leaving school Edna O’Brien moved to Dublin where she worked in a chemists and studied pharmacy. During this period she wrote small pieces for the Irish Press. She read writers such as Tolstoy, Thackeray, and F Scott Fitzgerald. The first book she ever bought was Introducing James Joyce by T.S. Eliot. She has said that Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man made her realise that she wanted to pursue literature for the rest of her life.
In 1954 she married – against her parents’ wished – the Czech/Irish writer Ernest Gébler, nearly twice her age, and the couple moved to London in 1960. They had two sons, Carlos and Sasha, but the marriage was dissolved in 1964. Ernest Gébler died in 1998.
Carlos Gebler in a RTE documentary, Flesh and Blood (2009) said that his father was intensely jealous of his mother’s swift rise to fame as a writer in the early Sixties. He revealed how her volatile marriage to his father broke up over bitter rows when he tried to claim success for her best-selling novels. “They had terrible arguments about money and she had to leave the house and didn’t see her children for a few years. For her, it was a nightmare,” he said.
Edna O’Brien published her first novel, The Country Girls, in 1960. It met with much criticism and was swiftly banned by the Irish Censor for its perceived explicit sexual content. A copy was burned by the curate of her local church in Co Clare. Her following five books, published during the 1960s, met the same fate at the hands of the Irish Censorship Board. O’Brien became a controversial figure in a conservative Catholic Ireland, a legacy that some would argue has impinged upon the critical reception of her work long after the disappearance of such moral indignation.
Edna O’Brien has written plays, children’s books, essays, screenplays, and non-fiction about Ireland. “Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire. Ireland has always been a woman, a womb, a cave, a cow, a Rosaleen, a sow, a bride, a harlot, and, of course, the gaunt Hag of Beare.” (from Mother Ireland, 1976)
Virginia (1981) her play about Virginia Woolf presented the softer side of the feminist writer.
As a short story writer she has published regularly in the New Yorker. Her tribute to her homeland, Mother Ireland (1976), appeared in 1977. It includes seven autobiographical essays, in which O’Brien weaves her own personal history with local customs and ancient Irish lore. Her other non-fiction works include James and Nora, a study of James Joyce’s marriage.
In several of her works O’Brien has focused on the bitterness of women who have experienced failures in their relationship with men. Her women are often victims of their upbringing and her male characters violent or weak or treacherous, as in Time and Tide (1992), which tells of Nell Steadman, an Irish editor living in London, her disappointments in love and marriage with a sadistic husband.
O’Brien also fictionalised real-life events: in the novel In The Forest (2002) based on the murder near where the author grew up of Imelda Riney, her son and a priest in a forest and written soon after the event, was criticised by some as insensitive.
Her impact upon modern Irish writing is considerable. She has received numerous awards for her works, including a Kingsley Amis Award in 1962, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 1990 for Lantern Slides, a collection of short stories, set primarily in Ireland. In 2006, Edna O’ Brien was appointed adjunct professor of English Literature in University College, Dublin, to which she also donated her literary papers. In 2009, she was honoured with the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award at a special ceremony for that year’s Irish Book Awards in Dublin. She has also been conferred a Doctor of Letters by the University of Limerick in 2004.
The CountryGirls was turned into an immemorable film. Zee & Co, her 1971 novel about marital discord and an ill-advised love triangle, was luckier, featuring Elizabeth Taylor, Susanna York and Michael Caine.

However, fame and success have not necessarily brought her a fortune. As she pointed out in an RTE documentary in 2012, it takes her between two and four years to complete a book, and she’s missed out on the largesse available from the big wallet literary prizes. And then there are the subjects she chooses: “The only things I can write are stories that don’t have Hollywood stamped on them,” she drily observed.
Until 2010 she owned a holiday home in Co Donegal, The Pink House, in Carrickfinn. Her memoir, initially titled Country Girl, is due to be published in 2012 by Faber. The publicity for the book says it will detail her encounters with Marlon Brando, Sam Beckett, Jackie Onassis, Bill Clinton, Robert Mitchum and Gerry Adams, among others. To a journalist who asked her about Brando, she merely said: “I met him at a dinner and we had a very interesting talk. Then he came to my house.” She later added that he stayed in her kitchen.

Brendan Behan was born in Dublin’s inner city on February 9, 1923. His father Stephen was a house painter who had been imprisoned as a republican. His mother Kathleen, also a republican activist, had a store of folk ballads and Brendan’s brother was a well-known singer and songwriter, Dominic Behan. Another brother Brian was a  radical political activist, author, and playwright.

Brendan Behan: "I am a drinker with writing problems"

Brendan’s uncle Peadar Kearney wrote the Irish national anthem, A Soldier’s Song.
In 1937 the family moved to a corporation housing scheme in Crumlin. At 14 Brendan became an apprentice painter and decorator. He became a member of Fianna Éireann, the youth organisation of the IRA. He published his first poems and prose in the Fianna’s magazine.
At 16 he joined the IRA and, equiped with explosives, embarked on a solo mission to England to blow up the Liverpool docks. He was arrested and sentenced to three years in a Suffolk borstal, where he made good use of the library, and which was to be the subject of his  book, Borstal Boy.
He returned to Ireland in 1941 and a year later  was given 14 years in Mountjoy prison for the attempted murder of two detectives in Dublin. Again he broadened his education, becoming a fluent Irish speaker. During his first months in Mountjoy prison, Sean O Faolain published Behan’s description of his borstal experiences in The Bell. These experiences were also relayed in the book Confessions of an Irish Rebel.
He was released in 1946 as part of a general amnesty and returned to house painting.  For some years he concentrated on writing verse in Irish. He lived in Paris for a time – drinking heavily and reputedly writing pornography -  before returning in 1950 to Dublin, where he became one of the more colourful figures in the city’s literary subculture.

His play The Quare Fellow was well received in 1954 in Dublin’s Pike Theatre. However, it was the 1956 production at Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Royal in London, that brought Behan a wider reputation – significantly assisted by a drunken interview with Malcolm Muggeridge on BBC television. Thereafter, Behan was never free from media attention, and he in turn was usually ready to play the drunken Irishman.
His next play, An Giall (1958), was commissioned by Gael Linn, the Gaelic language organisation. Behan translated the play into English as The Hostage and it was Joan Littlewood’s production which led to success in London. The play is set in a Dublin brothel where the IRA imprison an English soldier. (Some argue that Littlewood diluted the naturalism of the Irish version with interludes of music-hall singing and dancing). The transfer of the play to Broadway provided Behan with international recognition.
Behan’s autobiographical Borstal Boy also appeared in 1958, and its early chapters on prison life are among his best work. By then, however, he was a victim of his own celebrity, and alcoholism and diabetes were taking their toll. His English publishers suggested that, instead of the writing he now found difficult, he dictate to a tape recorder. The first outcome was Brendan Behan’s Island (1962), a readable collection of anecdotes and opinions in which it was apparent that Behan had moved away from the militant republicanism of his youth.
Tape-recording also produced Brendan Behan’s New York (1964) and Confessions of an Irish Rebel (1965), a disappointing sequel to Borstal Boy. A collection of newspaper columns from the 1950s, published as Hold Your Hour and Have Another (1963), merely underlined the weakness of his later work.
Behan had long been a heavy drinker and developed diabetes in the early 1960s. He once famously describing himself as “a drinker with a writing problem” and claiming “I only drink on two occasions — when I’m thirsty and when I’m not”. His drinking got worse with time, leading to a series of notorious drunken public appearances, on both stage and television.
Towards the end he became the caricature of the drunken Irishman which, along with his boorishness, made him unpopular with ordinary Dubliners. His response was another witticism: “There’s no bad publicity except an obituary.”

By early 1964, the end was in sight. After collapsing in a Dublin pub, he was rushed to the  Meath Hospital where he died several days later on March 20, aged 41. In 1955 Brendan Behan married Beatrice Salkeld (the daughter of painter Cecil Salkeld). The had two children, Blanaid and Paudge.

The sayings of Brendan Behan:

• I am a drinker with writing problems.
• Critics are like eunuchs in a harem. They’re there every night, they see it done every night, they see how it should be done every night, but they can’t do it themselves.
• The big difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs a lot less.
• The most important things to do in the world are to get something to eat, something to drink and somebody to love you.
• I never say actually … unless I am actually pissed.
• There’s no bad publicity except an obituary.
• When I came back to Dublin I was court-martialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.