Whatever happened to....?

What happens when an ordinary person gets caught up in the whirlwind of a national news story? With news available from so many different sources these days, perhaps don't stories just don't hang around as long as they used to.
I looked at a number of stories that were huge in Ireland in the 1980s onwards and asked some of the people at the centre of them how it felt to be in the spotlight.


CELEBRITY these days is very often a construction. Wannabe fame monsters – with or without talent – knock on the door of shows like X-Factor in the hope of achieving their 15 minutes of fame.

Lady Gaga told an interviewer: “How wonderfully memorable 30 years from now, when they say: ‘Do you remember Gaga and her bubbles?’” The popstar has turned self-publicity into an artform and made celebrity a goal in itself.

Even in the realm of serious news, some people catch our eye not simply because they were in the right (or wrong) place at the right (or wrong) time. It is three years since little Madeleine McCann was snatched from a holiday resort on the Algarve but there are few people who wouldn’t recognise the tear-shaped mark in the pupil of her right eye.

There are reasons for this outside the obvious tragedy of her abduction and it is largely to the credit of the sustained media and publicity campaign conducted by her parents Kate and Gerry. Understandably, they have gone to every length possible to never let the world forget about their daughter.

Even as recently as two decades ago, this kind of global saturation of a news story wasn’t as easy to achieve. In Ireland especially, news was a slow drip-feed of largely local stories. The internet was in its infancy and 24-hour news stations were not on our airwaves. When a story caught our imagination, it wasn’t wiped out by the next trending topic on Twitter. If it caught hold of the public imagination, it stayed there. Try watching an episode of RTE’s Reeling In The Years nostalgia-fest and see if your eyes don’t mist up at some point or other.

The irony was that most of those at the centre of such iconic stories were incidental celebrities. They were men, women and children whose face became as well known to us as that of our own family – but they didn’t necessarily ask for it.

As a first-time mum just hours after giving birth, Veronica Cassidy was in a vulnerable position when she was thrust into the spotlight. She had given birth to Ireland’s only set of quintuplets and she and husband Kevin were trying to cope with
their instant large family.

“The attention was dreadful,” says Veronica from her home in Bridgetown, Co Wexford. It is a rare quiet hour before the five – Conor, Dearbhail, Amy, Cian and Rory – come home from school. They are now fine, boisterous nine years olds but when they were born in Dublin’s Rotunda in August 2001, Veronica was terribly worried about them.

“They were so small and people just seemed to have gotten my number and were constantly ringing, looking for information and it was just horrible. And because you’d never been in that situation, you didn’t know how to deal with it. I remember Dr Peter McKenna organised a PR for us to help us out with the situation and who advised us loads.”

And yet Veronica understood that the attention from the public themselves was well-intentioned and that there was “upsides” to the media focus too.

“Without that media attention we wouldn’t have got the sponsorship that we got and we would have found it more difficult financially,” she acknowledges.

As the Cassidys discovered, stories relating to children tend to stick in the mind.

“The picture of a child can capture the imagination,” says Stephen O’Leary, whose company O’Leary Analytics profiles the attention particular news stories get across the media. “People feel involved in the stories of children as they feed into the perception of good and evil. We see the angelic, innocent child that reminds us of our own childhood or children, if we have them ourselves. These stories pull on the heartstrings really.”

The image of Colin McStay’s huge brown eyes and gorgeous smile certainly captured the hearts of the nation when he appeared on the Late, Late Show in 1984. He was an 18-month-old with a rare liver disorder and his mother Margaret McStay had written to Gay Byrne to appeal for his help in raising funds to send Colin to America for a life-saving liver transplant.

The public, touched to the core by Colin’s plight, sent donations flooding in and the target was reached and exceeded within weeks. However, the wait for a new liver for Colin was a long one. By the time Colin finally got his operation, he was over two, very weak and Margaret and dad Leonard were finding the attention on the family almost an extra cross to bear.

The op was successful and today the family have tried to retreat hugely from the limelight. “The whole object of it (the McStay’s fundraising appeal) was to give him a normal life and that’s his life now,” says Margaret from the family home in Rathmines, Dublin.

Colin doesn’t like to give interviews about his past although the family are contacted about three times a year for one. The response to Colin as a tot was so enormous that the nation began to feel that he was, partly, everybody’s child. It is only by his retreat into anonymity that he feels he can make his life his own.

Ironically, Colin went on to study journalism and is now, says Margaret, freelancing and trying to build his CV of published work.

“What’s difficult for him is if he rings someone to ask them about something from another perspective, people basically start saying, ‘Are you him?’” says Margaret. “So you know if you’re going to be in that field, you really have to put away your own story so that it’s the other person’s story that is interesting.

“We’re back into private life and that’s where we’d like to stay. I don’t like saying ‘No’ but it just seems all round better for all of us. It’s been that way for a long while now.”

Brian Keenan would understand how hard it is to not let one period of your life define the rest of your days. When the author and former teacher released from over four years of being held hostage in Beirut in August 1990, he took himself off to the wilds of the Irish countryside for three years. He had to come to terms with both the trauma and torture he had endured in captivity – but also to get away from the intense scrutiny that was a result of the huge campaign to get him out.

Obviously, given his isolation in Beirut, it had all come as a shock to him. In 1999, he spoke of how he had even had to leave his sisters Elaine and Brenda, who had campaigned so tirelessly on his behalf.

“I left them after three days,” he said then, explaining that “It seemed like rejection, but it wasn’t in my nature to let them nursemaid me.” He now sees them regularly, as he does former hostage John McCarthy.

Our image of Keenan might be frozen to that moment when he emerged, hollow-cheeked but smiling, at the top of a set of airplane stairs on an August night 20 years ago – but his life has moved on. He is married now to physiotherapist Audrey and they have two young sons, Jack and Cal. “My children,” he said last year as he published a memoir of his childhood in Belfast, “are among the few people in the world who don’t think of me as an ex-hostage”.

On a different but no less important level, Veronica Cassidy has found that while the public may sometimes wonder, ‘Where are they now?’, her children’s lives have also progressed from our last photographs of them on their first day at school.

“The last big thing really was when they started school and that was it basically,” she says. “There would have been a lot of attention on them on their birthdays up until they were five. But we had Communion this year and there wasn’t a thing about it and that was great.”

Being adored by the nation didn’t really hurt the children though. “They did behind it all feel a bit special, and they did enjoy it,” says Veronica. When sextuplets were born to a couple in Belfast last year, one of her boys was even heard to remark, ‘We’re not famous anymore now!’. “That’s right – he was a bit starstruck by it all for a while,” laughs Veronica.

These stories, at least, had joyous endings. Others that remain with us do so because of a deep sense of poignancy that never quite goes away. Philip Cairns, the 13-year-old Dublin schoolboy who went missing in 1986, is obviously never far from the minds of his family. He disappeared on the way to school in Rathfarnham one bright October morning. His schoolbag, found in a nearby laneway days after he went missing, dry despite hours of heavy rain so evidently planted there by somebody, was the only trace ever found of Philip.

His brother Eoin made a renewed appeal on the 21st anniversary of Philip’s disappearance for new information but the family generally prefer to observe their grief privately. Det Sgt Tom Doyle, who heads up the investigation on Philip’s still-open case, has said that whenever mention is made of Philip in the news, it sparks off another rush of phonecalls.

“Every time there has been a major story about him in the papers or on the television, there has been a huge upsurge in the number of people contacting us,” he said. “My attitude would be that it's important to keep his name out there. Some member of the public has the answer to this riddle. We need to find that person.”

There are plenty of shocking international stories breaking on a daily basis these days – perhaps domestic stories won’t stick with us in the future now that we no longer worry just about what is in our own backyard. Would the revelation that a Bishop had had an affair with an adult woman and fathered a child cause as big a scandal now as it did when Annie Murphy revealed she had had a son, Peter, by Bishop Eamon Casey on the Late, Late Show in 1992?

“I think in some ways we are bombarded with news now,” says news analyst Stephen O’Leary. “Because we’re getting so much so quickly, I think that a lot of it is getting diluted. An image that might have stood out so much in the 1980s, like Colin McStay or Philip Cairns or Annie Murphy, they would have been isolated big news stories.


“News stories are far more easily replaced now. Even some of those celebrity stories involving John Terry or Tiger Woods, which got huge, intense coverage this year, get replaced by another story quite quickly.”

By contrast, whenever mention is made of Malcolm MacArthur – the man jailed for life for the murder of nurse Bridie Gargan in the Phoenix Park in 1982 and who also killed farmer Donal Dunne three days later - possibly coming up for probation, it is easy to recall the waves of revulsion and fear felt by the public. MacArthur was on the run for two weeks before being arrested in the home of the then Attorney General Patrick Connolly, who had no idea what MacArthur had done. The scandal even earned a new acronym – GUBU – after Charlie Haughey described it “grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented”.

The same horror surrounded the shooting dead of criminal Martin ‘The General’ Cahill on a quiet suburban road in Rathgar in 1994. These kind of things didn’t happen on our doorstep – the sense that fledgling gangland Ireland was spilling over into the lives of ordinary, decent citizens was terrifying.

On the other hand, the good news stories had a firmer grip on us too. Many of the residents of Ballinspittle in Co Cork, for example, still feel fondly about their time in the sun. In the summer of 1985, one Mrs Cathy O’Mahony, a neighbour and their children, believed they saw a statue of Our Lady swaying in the village grotto. TV cameras, news reporters and busloads of the faithful flocked to the tiny village to check out the “moving statue” for themselves. Mrs O’Mahony died early this year but never for a moment in the intervening 25 years doubted what she saw was real.

“You’d still get a good turnout on August 15 every year at the grotto,” says local councillor Alan Coleman. “But it’s not in the consciousness like it was back then. People are delighted that it put the village on the map. It was the dreary 1980s, we had a recession and had two very bad summers so it was very welcome. There was nothing negative as far as they were concerned.

“In fact, I remember a famous character in the area, a Cllr O’Reilly. He was old-world, old-style and when the statue was attacked with a hammer one night, he set up road blocks straight away to try and catch the fella! Everyone rallied round.”

Local postmaster Anto Hegarty was 10 when the phenomenon kicked off and he remembers it as an “unbelievable summer”. He concedes that if he mentions to someone that he is from Ballinspittle now, they will have a little joke with him – but just as quickly ask for details on what happened. “Visitors are still a bit fascinated by it all.”

Then there are stories that just stick with us because, like Peig, that nemesis of the Irish language student would say, we’ll never see their like again. This would seem to apply to the adventure of a 10-year-old called Keith Byrne and a 13-year-old Noel Murray that same summer of moving statues and Live Aid, 1985. The two pals from Dublin got a whim one day to take a trip on the relatively new DART train. They hopped on one to Dun Laoghaire, then stowed away on a ferry to Holyhead. From there, they got a train to London and, telling airport security men that their mother was behind them with passport and boarding cards, got on a flight to New York.

The two voyagers were finally discovered in JFK airport, asking a policeman for directions to Manhattan, or “town” as they put it. They were returned to Ireland by an astonished NYPD and greeted at home by two very worried families. They both now live quietly in the east of the country but don’t tend to reminisce too much about their extraordinary trip.

Paul Russell, who made a radio documentary with RTE producer Ronan Kelly about the boys’ big adventure called Don’t Go Far…Your Dinner’s Nearly Ready (available to listen to on the RTE website), says the story immediately caught his eye when he worked as a news sub-editor on the Evening Herald at the time.

“It was something that you wished you had done yourself or you admired someone else for doing it,” he remembers. “It was something that was planted at the back of my head and literally stayed there for the last 25 years.

“People didn’t really do exotic things in Ireland in the ’80s. I suppose the most uplifting thing that happened for Ireland that summer had only happened a few weeks before, and that was U2 at Live Aid. Suddenly there was this Irish sense of importance on a world stage.

“It’s interesting to look at the newspapers of that era and look at the context in which these stories appeared: They are few and far between. You did have a lot of desperation - there were certain ministers advising young people to leave the country because they were better off emigrating, so it was depressing. So these stories do help raise the spirit.”

Apart from the historical context, there are just some stories that stay in our hearts because they are unlikely to happen again. Certainly with the evolution of global security measures, the boys couldn’t slip through airport barriers today as easily as they did then.

“It might sound a bit cynical,” laughs Paul, “But also, kids these days, if they are looking for adventure, they’ll probably try to hack into someone’s website rather than leave their garden in the first place.”


WHO WILL THE WORLD REMEMBER IN 20 YEARS’ TIME?
With news and information coming at us from all angles 24/7, our focus can be divided and news stories can be overshadowed in an instant. There are, however, a few newsmakers who are likely to make a show like Reeling In The Years in decades to come…

Madeleine McCann: The image of the little girl who went missing from a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal in May 2007 has become unforgettable, mostly because of her parents’ sustained publicity campaign to keep her picture in the public eye. Her story also had a hugely emotional element for parents who recognised her disappearance as their worst nightmare.

Jade Goody: Reality television will probably still be a constant with us in 20 years’ time – but will we still remember Jade Goody, one of the first celebrities entirely made from her appearances on reality shows? The fact that her last days were documented by TV cameras make her a tragic distinction in a world where celebs are created – and forgotten – every 15 minutes.

The Obamas: We still know who JFK is, right? Although Kennedy’s presidency became particularly notorious because of his assassination, Barack Obama has made history on his own account by becoming the first black President of the United States. The pictures of him with wife Michelle on inauguration night caused some to dub the new era in the White House, Obamelot.

Osama bin Laden: If innocence has a face, it is probably Maddie McCanns. If evil could be personified, many would probably plump for bin Laden. There are a number of reasons for why he should be so instantly recognizable over so many other human rights violators. There is his association with a defining moment in western history of course – 9/11 – and with the feared al’Qaeda. Also, in this era of constant image bombardment, the fact that pictures of him are so scarce has made the clearest and last-known one almost iconic.

Harry Potter: Not a real live person, perhaps, but the Harry Potter phenomenon has infiltrated so many countries (translated into 67 languages at last count) and been such a commercial success (400 million books sold, never mind the films and merchandise) that his influence will be felt long after He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named disappears in a puff of smoke.

Britney Spears: Young female pop stars are for the most part interchangeable but Britney Spears will somehow survive both as a cautionary tale of the new cult of celebrity and the original breakout teenybopper of the 1990s and Noughties.


Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman; Sara Payne: Like the case of Philip Cairns here in the 1980s, the idea of children going missing in broad daylight struck a terrible chord with the public. What makes these cases different was that we could watch them unfold via Sky News bulletins every hour, on the hour, heightening the sense of personal involvement right until their tragic denouments.

Sara Payne was snatched from a field where she was playing with her brothers and killed by paedophile Roy Whiting. In the most bizarre twist of all, Ian Huntley was interviewed on camera by an unwitting news team before he was discovered to be the killer of Wells and Chapman in the little village of Soham.


FIVE-SECOND STARDOM
Fleeting fame is a cheap commodity on the small screen these days. With digital TV pumping out thousands of images on multiple channels every minute, it’s harder for any one face to stick out. But back when Ireland was still a two-channel land, certain homegrown telly ads created characters who are still remembered fondly by the public.

• Sally O’Brien – and the way she might look at you:
An Irish ex-pat working in some sweltering exotic part of the world dreams of all the things he misses about home. A cool pint of Harp, naturally, but also a night in the local pub, with the aforementioned Sally O’Brien making eyes at him. So attached were we to this model of Irish femininity that there was public outrage when it emerged that Sally was actually played by an English actress, Vicki Michelle who would go on to star in TV comedy series ’Allo ’Allo. It turned out that the ex-pat himself was also played by an English actor.

• The prodigal son:
There is no welcome like the welcome home of an Irish mammy to her son after he’s been away gallivanting in an unspecified but farflung place. The ESB ad which showed a young man being driven home from the train station by his father, as his mother rushed around preparing the house for his arrival. With the soundtrack of Dusty Springfield’s Goin’ Home, it again tugged at the heartstrings of a nation beset by 1980s emigration. The returning son was played by a baby-faced Alan Hughes, who went on to present a game show for RTE and is now a firm fixture on TV3.

• Dancing king:
He never said a word but actor Joe McKinney sparked a dancing craze when he performed a restless jig waiting for his pint of Guinness to settle in the 1994 ad, Anticipation. McKinney spent the next two years of his life promoting Guinness around the world but found it a heady lifestyle. He gave up drinking 13 years ago, and is still an actor. He appeared in Glenroe and has had regular small parts in films from King Arthur to the upcoming Camelot.

• Buttering him up:
You can keep your Nescafe Gold Blend ads – Kerrygold had the sexiest TV ads in the 1980s, all simmering repressed sexuality and saucy-tongued Irish women. Two Frenchmen return from a fishing trip to their Irish lodgings. The good-looking one asks if “zere is somezing I can ’elp”. There comes the loaded reply: “You can put a bit of butter on the spuds, Andre.” A later ad came with a role reversal; a sexy French woman flirting with actor Enda Oates (who played Reverend George in Glenroe) as his son asks “Dad, who’s taking the horse to France?”

• Mother of the holy trinity of biscuits:
Kimberly, Mikado and Coconut Creams are such quintessentially Irish biscuits that only a quintessentially Irish personality would do to advertise them. Panto queen Maureen Potter became the face of the Jacobs’ trio in the 1970s and kickstarted the timeless slogan, ‘Someone you love would love some (Mum)’ as she handed them out to Kimberly the cowboy, Mikado the comedy Chinese figure – no PC police in the 1970s, then – and Coconut Cream, a little girl.


FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/when-ordinary-people-become-frontpage-news-2361875.html

What drives a mother to kill?

This is the cover story I wrote for the Irish Independent's Weekend magazine of September 4 last. Hard to report on, but not half as harrowing as being a relative of any of the parties involved in these cases.


MOST parents’ idea of a nightmare would be to outlive their children. No wonder then that when a child dies at the hands of a parent, it provokes outrage and disbelief. When that parent is a mother, it seems the most heinous act of all: a mockery of the primal human instinct of maternal love.

No-one knows if these were Ruth Murphy’s final thoughts a fortnight ago when she tied two plastic bags around her head and slowly suffocated to death on the floor of her cell in the Dochas women’s prison in Mountjoy. Murphy was serving a life sentence for murdering her seven-year-old son Karl in June 2001. Karl too had spent his last moments struggling for precious gasps of air, his head held firmly under water at Greystones beach by his mother as she drowned him.

Although she was found crying and incoherent on the shore near where Karl’s body lay in shallow water, Ruth Murphy did not admit killing him until shortly before her trial was to begin in 2004. It would have been very difficult to explain away the six dark fingermarks on his neck which proved the lie to her original story that he had accidentally drowned. The traumatic nature of his death, and his mother’s part in it, shocked the nation.

“There’s nothing in our culture, our literature, our day-to-day experience that would suggest that women are more dangerous than men where children are concerned so when you have a situation where a woman harms a child, it’s bound to come as a terrible shock,” says Fergus Finlay, CEO of children’s charity Barnardos.

Ruth Murphy had been an alcoholic and was estranged from Karl’s father, who had custody of their son. She was attending a psychiatrist, was drinking heavily and was on anti-anxiety drugs when she snatched Karl during one of her court-restricted visits to him at the home of a couple who babysat him in Glenealy, Co Wicklow. She drove him to Greystones beach and – in an act so poignantly in contrast to what was to follow - gave him sandwiches, Coke and crisps shortly before she ended his life.

In her seven years in jail, Murphy never explained why she had killed her son although her alcoholism and fragile mental state clearly played a part. As she didn’t leave a suicide note, neither will her family ever know exactly why she put an end to her own life. Dochas staff say that she had been in the grip of a depressive phase in the weeks before she died – but had she also reached a point at which she could no longer live with what she had done?

The incomprehensible nature of maternal filicide – mothers who kill their own children – is perhaps the hardest cross to bear for those left behind. Eddie Reddy, whose sister Sharon Grace drowned herself and her two little daughters on Kaat’s Strand in Co Wexford in April 2005, says his family will never know if anything could have been done to prevent her desperate actions.



“That question will always be there,” Eddie told Weekend. “Who knows? You can’t get hung up on the question or it will eat away at you. It happened, you can’t change the past, the only thing you can change is the future.”

Sharon had become depressed after separating from her husband Barry, father to Mikhala, four, and Abby, three, the previous Christmas. On the evening of the tragedy, she had called to Ely Hospital in Wexford, pleading to speak with a social worker. She was told there was nobody to speak with her and no out-of-hours emergency number she could call. The three bodies of Sharon and her little girls were found floating in three feet of water on Kaat’s Strand the following morning. She left behind an 11-year-old daughter Amy from a previous relationship, who is now in the care of Sharon’s sister Lillian.

“As far as I know, the situation (regarding the provision of out-of-hours social services) hasn’t changed,” says Eddie. He is now 29, the same age Sharon was when she died. “The way I look at things is that the country had loads and loads of money and it didn’t invest in mental health back then. They’re not going to do it now there is no money.”

Eddie has instead channelled his grief into fundraising for the suicide charity Console. He dedicated a 160km sponsored cycle last January to his lost sister and nieces, and organises other fundraising events through the website www.sharongracememorial.com. His efforts have helped Console to set up a drop-in suicide awareness and prevention centre, Console House, in Wexford town.

“It’s always inside of you, but you have to let it go and try to get some good to come from something that was so bad,” says Eddie. “It was such a high-profile case that it would be terrible to let it go without trying to get some good out of it.”
He says that he and his family can’t afford to live in the past: “You can only change what’s in front of you”. He does, however, think that recognising and speaking about what might seem an unspeakable act is a way forward in preventing further murder-suicides like his sister’s.

“Five years ago, it wasn’t talked about. People have become more open, realised that people have problems and they need to talk to each other. Problems you have in your head can seem so big, and to share it with others could make you think it’s not so big after all. It’s hard going but all you can do is learn from the past.”

As in the case of Sharon Grace, many mothers who kill their children frequently take their own lives too. This, of course, makes it impossible to question their motivation in the aftermath. There are a few tragedies that quickly emerge to be the direct result of severe psychiatric illnesses. Forensic psychologist Dr Brian McCaffrey testified at the 2002 murder trial of Jacqueline Costello, who strangled and suffocated her eight-year-old son Robert in 2000 at their home in Mullinavat, Co Kilkenny. She had been released that very morning from Waterford General Hospital where she had been treated for depression.

Dr McCaffrey says: “In the Costello case, she was schizophrenic, she definitely had a psychotic illness.” He told her murder trial that he believed her schizophrenia was misdiagnosed as post-natal depression. Jacqueline’s mother had also been a schizophrenic and Jacqueline had previously raised her concerns about the mental health legacy she had inherited. She was found guilty but insane of Robert’s murder.

The Costello trial judge Mr Justice Paul Butler criticised the criminal insanity law which allowed a mentally ill person to be branded guilty as “not only grotesque but obscene”. The law changed in 2006 to create the new verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity – and 47-year-old psychiatrist Lynn Hutchinson became the second person ever to be returned this verdict after she drowned her 16-year-old daughter Ciara Gibbs in a bathtub.

That tragedy made headline news: here was a highly educated woman who had raised her academic, beautiful daughter and younger son in a loving, stable home with her husband Gerard Gibbs, a fellow psychiatrist.

The day of the tragedy, Lynn and Ciara had gone shopping in Dublin while her son and husband were visiting family overnight. That evening, back home in Kilkenny after their day trip, Lynn Hutchinson ended her daughter’s life. Her trial concluded that she had been suffering from a severe mental disorder at the time and had also spiralled out of control when she realised that Ciara had begun suffering from symptoms of anorexia, something Lynn had experienced herself as a young woman.

“I personally can’t conceive of any situation where somebody would intellectualise in a sane and rational way the thought that I must kill my child in my child’s interest – and give vent to it,” says Fergus Finlay. “I think something has have had to gone seriously, psychiatrically wrong for the thought to be translated into action.

“In the situation where the psychiatrist drowned her daughter it concerned with the mental health of the woman. And the only possible prevention is one which addresses the mental health of the mother early. As often or not, that’s only going to happen out of luck unless the mother is actively seeking help.”

There are other cases that are even harder to get a handle on. Norah Gibbons, a leading children’s advocate who is currently compiling the report for the Government on children’s deaths while in State care, makes the point that there is “not always an underlying psychiatric illness”.

As adults, we may feel that our children ‘belong’ to us. “Possessiveness, in its positive slant, it can lead us to protect and identify with the child,” says Gibbons. “But then clearly when it gets distorted, a possessive love, whether between adults or adults to children, it turns into a type of total ownership of the person which is completely unhealthy. When that possessive and destructive love is challenged, the child can be killed rather than let the child go to develop as all children must.”

Neighbours and relatives of mother Mary Keegan were stunned and devastated when she stabbed her sons Glen, 10, and Andrew, six, in the kitchen of their comfortable family home in Firhouse, Dublin in February 2006 and then slashed her own neck and wrist. At their inquests, her husband Brian, who had been away on business at the time of the deaths, said that he had not known that his wife was depressed.

“I am proud to have known and married Mary,” he said. “She was the most loving and generous person I ever met and an inspiration to me and our beautiful children. There is no anger in my heart towards her as her actions were borne out of a will to protect our children from the harshness she perceived in this world.”

This would seem to illustrate cases Fergus Finlay relates in which he says that because of the difficulties a mother has had to face, or the difficulties they perceive their child might have to face in the future, “they have come to the intellectual conclusion that if they weren’t there, their child would be better off being with them”.

The family of Galway woman Catherine Palmer found an indication of the turmoil she was in when she drove herself and her two daughters Jennifer, nine, and Louisa, six, off the pier at Kinvara in March 1999. A piece of notepaper found in Catherine’s pocket had “this is hell” written nine times on one side. The words, “a disgusting waste of two beautiful girls, two human beings”, and the words “waste” and “destroy” were written on the other side. She had told her husband Geoffrey that she was bringing the girls swimming at the Leisureplex in Galway.

Cases of murder-suicide at the hands of a parent are mercifully rare, says Dr John Connolly of the Irish Association of Suicidology. “But they get big coverage when they do happen,” he says. “What we’re always worried about when you’re reporting things like this, and the high profile they get, is copycat suicides or murder-suicides.” However, he said that at one point he noted that provincial papers didn’t report suicides, while nationals did. “It’s hard to know which is right. Maybe not to report it is stigmatising it as much.”

Of particular heartbreak were a trio of tragedies that took place in a period of nine months from May 2007 to January 2008. The first concerned Caitriona Innes, a single mum who had just broken up with her boyfriend days before she suffocated her seven-year-old daughter Caitlin at their Letterkenny home in Co Donegal. Caitlin had just received her First Communion that day.

Two months later, in July 2007, the bodies of Nollaig Owen and her baby son Tadhg were recovered from the River Araglin in Co Cork. Nollaig was believed to have been suffering from post-natal depression and a jury returned an open verdict on their deaths although the inquest heard that Nollaig had attempted suicide four days earlier.

Then in January 2008, young mum Eileen Murphy fell from the Cliffs of Moher with her four-year-old son Evan in her arms. The details of how Eileen had travelled from her home near Mallow, Co Cork with Evan, booked into a hotel in Galway the night before their deaths and then bought bus tickets to the Cliffs of Moher were chilling. Her inquest heard that Eileen got off the bus and headed up to the cliff edge so quickly that the driver warned her to be careful. Her family said they were disturbed by inaccurate reports that Eileen had thrown Evan from the cliff first, and then jumped after him.

“Every single one of those cases do require to be seriously looked at,” says Norah Gibbons. “The untimely death of any child needs to be examined because we need to learn from it. I know the Ombudsman for Children recommended to the Government about how the deaths of children should be dealt with in making sure that the learning is picked up.

“They are all absolute tragedies, for the children whose lives have been ended in an untimely manner, and when parents do it it’s an absolute double tragedy.”

• The Samaritans can be contacted 24 hours a day at 1850 609090

THE UNTHINKABLE CASES THAT SHOCKED THE WORLD:
DOMINIQUE COTTREZ
This 46-year-old French woman has two daughters now in their 20s but admitted last month to killing eight of her newborn infants and has since been charged with murder. Bodies of two babies were discovered by occupants of a house in which Cottrez and her husband once lived in Villers-au-Tetre. Family and neighbours maintained they had never noticed her pregnancies because she was an overweight woman.
A lawyer for her husband released a statement saying that the couple were still together: “There is no rejection and they are very united.” Sabine Hilschenz of Germany was convicted in 2006 of also killing eight of her newborns.

ANGELA GORDON
When Angela Gordon’s seven-year-old daughter Khyra Ishaq died in May 2008, she weighed just three stone. She had starved to death following months of neglect and possibly years of physical abuse at their Birmingham home. Gordon and her partner were convicted of manslaughter this year.
What shocked observers was that Khyra and her five siblings had been previously noted to be at-risk children but according to a report into her death, some State agencies “lost sight of the child and focused instead upon the rights of the adults, the adults' behaviour and the potential impact for themselves as professionals”.

ANDREA YATES
When Irish-American Andrea Yates, 36, drowned her five young children – ranging in age from Noah, seven, to baby Mary, six months - in a bathtub on June 20, 2001, the news again rocked Houston, Texas. The ensuing murder trial also made waves worldwide because it put a spotlight on the legal test for sanity called the M’Naghten Rules. Her defence team claimed her murderous actions were a direct result of Yates suffering years of post-natal depression and psychosis.
Yates was convicted of capital murder but in 2006 this was overturned and she was found not guilty by reason of insanity. She is now in a low-security state mental hospital.

SUSAN SMITH
In October 1994, Susan Smith drowned her two young sons, buckling them into their car seats as they slept and pushing the car into a lake in South Carolina. Smith became the focus of public anger for sending police on a false manhunt for a non-existent black man who she said had hijacked her car with the children in it, and for her apparently attention-seeking appearances in the media begging for the boys’ return. She confessed nine days later to killing Michael, 3, and Alex, 14 months and is serving life in prison for the double murder. She had a court appeal rejected in March of this year.

MARYBETH TINNING
Tinning was considered a very unfortunate mother when she lost nine of her children over a period of 13 years from 1972. Most of the children – including an adopted child - died suddenly when they were babies. Tinning became a well-known visitor to the A&E centres of Schenectady, New York for running in with one of her babies cradled in her arms, either dead or near dead.
When she was finally charged with the murder of her last baby, four-month-old Tami Lynne, in 1985 Tinning admitted smothering three of her children. She was convicted of murder in the second degree in Tami Lynne’s case but there was not felt to be sufficient evidence in the deaths of the other children to take further action. Much coverage of her case has focused on why no social worker, doctor or family member voiced suspicion over the children’s deaths. Tinning, now 67, is still in jail – she was denied parole last year.


WHAT IS INFANTICIDE?
While the murder of children by their mothers receives huge attention when it happens, infanticide – the killing of babies under the age of 12 months – has been a common occurrence throughout history. In ancient times it was sometimes the result of child sacrifice to ‘appease’ the gods, as in Incan and Babylonian culture.

Superstition sometimes played a part – twins were thought to be a harbringer of evil in some cultures and murdered at birth. In others, infanticide was used as a socially accepted method of keeping population numbers down, and girl babies were often most at risk. That practice, though illegal, is thought to still happen in certain parts of densely-populated India and China.

In Irish law, if a woman is charged with killing her baby when it is under one year old, the charging judge can decide to have her tried for infanticide rather than murder. The Infanticide Act says that it is a specific crime that is “tried and punished as for manslaughter”. This is to allow for the fact that the mother may have harmed her baby while suffering negative hormonal effects from childbirth or “lactation”. As such, the penalty for an infanticide conviction would be much lower than if a murder charge had been brought against the mother.


‘THE USUAL TALE, SEDUCTION, DESERTION AND INFANTICIDE’: IRELAND’S LOST BABIES
It is difficult for us to understand the killing of children in our modern society. From Victorian times until the mid-20th century here, however, social and religious factors appeared to have played a big part in the decision of mothers to take their babies’ lives.

In Ireland in the 1940s, for example, there was a spike in infanticides because the Emergency Powers Act during World War II prevented pregnant Irish women from travelling to England to have abortions or to give their babies up for adoption as they had prior to this time.

A study of mothers sent to the Central Mental Hospital in Dublin from 1850 onwards after being charged with infanticide or child murder showed that most of these were admitted in Victorian times. There was evidence in most cases of psychological disturbance, such as in the case of Mrs F, a 31-year-old ballerina who was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude in 1888 for the manslaughter of her baby. Mrs F claimed her cell was haunted and also that she was a capmaker to the British Queen and “could hear speeches from a London via a telephone that ran directly from her cell to the chambers of parliament”.

Poignantly, the study also outlines the sad cases of Miss G, a 20-year-old single servant girl found guilty but insane in 1883 of the murder of her baby and of Miss C, an 18-year-old single woman from Dublin who was admitted in 1888 to the Central Mental Hospital as unfit to plead to the manslaughter of her child.

It appears that Miss C may have been suffering from mental illness but also have had a mental age much younger than her 18 years. She is described, in the rather un-PC words of the time, as “a congenital idiot becoming very excited and violent at each menstrual period”.

Miss G, on the other hand was described as an “unfortunate young woman” who did not appear to be insane at the time of her admission to the hospital. The admitting officer notes sadly that her story was “the usual tale, seduction, desertion and infanticide”.

The grey matter

My piece on the vogue for dyeing hair... grey - from the Indo's Weekend mag last Saturday.

Elizabeth Taylor, hair still blue-black into her 78th year, has not got the memo that grey is in vogue. Stars such as Helen Mirren, Jamie Lee Curtis, Diane Keaton and Emmylou Harris have been noticeably growing old grey-cefully in recent years and earning applause for it.

But the appearance of gunmetal and silver shades is no longer the preserve of the ageing. For some young hipsters, going grey is something to dye for. Pixie Geldof traded in her trademark peroxide crop for grey, saying: "I'd been blonde for three years and fancied a change." Kelly Osbourne looked lovely in mauve earlier this year, and pop star Pink has been tinting her platinum locks silver-grey.

As style fads go it's an interesting one, not least because fashion normally rejects anything that suggests ageing -- and because it doesn't seem to be going away.

The August edition of US 'Vogue' sported a photograph of a model with waist-length silver-grey hair, sleek as a cat in polo neck and pencil skirt, suggesting that grey will be good at least into autumn/winter 2010.

Supermodel Kristen McMenamy has just done a shoot for cutting-edge fashion and culture mag 'Dazed & Confused', long grey locks rolling over her shoulders.

The notoriously fickle world of high fashion has even been showing some consistency on the grey matter. Two years ago, silver-haired models began to appear on the Parisian catwalks for Givenchy. This year, Calvin Klein sent out a model with a slick salt-and-pepper ponytail to showcase its autumn/winter collection. Designers Giles Deacon and Gareth Pugh also turned their models' hair the colour of concrete for their 2010 shows.

As Meryl Streep's Anna Wintour-esque fashion mag editor explains in 'The Devil Wears Prada', trends work on a trickle-down basis. First they appear on the catwalk, then on the back of some wealthy haute-couture client, then get mass exposure from influential celebrities before finally winding their way down to the woman on the street.

The celebrity advocates have surely now reached tipping point. Two huge trendsetters on either side of the Atlantic have been at the toner bottle. In the US, Ashley Olsen reinvented the blue rinse by sporting blue-grey highlights in her tousled hair, while Kate Moss got skunk streaks to launch her collaboration with Longchamps.

As with her skinny-jeans-tucked-into-boots combo, are we next?

Sharon Rice, stylist with cutting-edge hair and beauty salon Brown Sugar in Dublin, says: "Things like that do catch on. It's different from when we've had people in the past who were going grey and coming into us looking to enhance it rather than hide it. Or someone who has short blonde hair, they might add tones of silver.

"We haven't seen younger people coming in yet actively looking to dye their hair grey, but I wouldn't be surprised if it happens and we would welcome it because we love doing adventurous stuff."

This slightly rebellious idea of turning one's hair grey when so many in the world spend a fortune on covering their natural greys is key to why the trend has taken off. Pixie Geldof, for example, was not worried that she'd be mistaken for her badger-headed dad Bob, saying of her grey 'do': "It was rad".

When younger people experiment with grey, they wear it with the confidence that it won't make them look prematurely old because they don't have the wrinkles to match. This was especially true of a fashion blogger called Tavi (her surname is Gevinson, but the 'biz' is so in awe of her that she's been given the first-name-only respect).

Tavi is remarkable for many reasons. She's only 13, but she always bags front-row seats at major catwalk shows because her blog is so influential. She also stood out when she turned up at New York Fashion Week sporting a short, grey hairdo. She dyed her hair a soft baby blue a few weeks earlier so that it would have faded to the correct tone of granny-chic grey by the time she appeared front row at the shows.

Sadly, the grey trend doesn't mean that the fashion and beauty industry is suddenly embracing the ageing process. Barack Obama was accused (falsely, of course) in the early days of his US Presidency of adding grey to his hair for extra gravitas. No one would ever accuse a woman of the same. Men get the 'Clooney' and 'distinguished' tags when they start to go silver at the temples; greying women are more likely to face insinuations that they have let themselves go.

Saying that, this wouldn't be the first time grey has had its go on the fashion merry-go-round. Men and women alike went crazy for dove-grey locks in the 1700s, sometimes wearing wigs to get the full halo effect. Otherwise, they powdered their hair white, oiling it to make the powder stick. It was messy, it was smelly and it ruined expensive clothing, but it was de rigueur for the fashionable set.

Marie Antoinette, the trendsetter of her time, loved wig powder to the point of losing her head over it. Her liberal use of the powder was condemned as another sign of her extravagant tastes as the rest of 18th-century France struggled with poverty. There was her country suffering through the Flour War of 1775, and there she was using enough flour in her hair each morning to feed a large family.

By the turn of the century, the English had laid a heavy tax on hair powder and the grey days of Marie Antoinette were over. One hundred years later, in 1907, L'Oréal founder Eugène Schueller had created the first synthetic dye. By this stage, the average life expectancy had increased from around 37 years in 1800 to 47 years in 1900. The appeal of going grey for fashion was considerably lessened by the fact that people were living long enough to see their hair fade naturally.

Now that home hair dye is readily and cheaply available -- it's a €3 billion industry in the EU alone -- perhaps going grey has a chance for a comeback as a fashion statement because it is a choice, not an inevitability. Rod Stanley, editor of 'Dazed & Confused', said it "remained to be seen" if grey was here to stay. "The trend for younger people dying their hair grey is a different thing in many ways but, of course, that could make people more receptive to naturally grey hair in images." Or as Kristen McMenamy puts it herself: "You can get older and still be rock'n'roll."

Here's hoping Pixie Geldof is still rocking a head of granite highlights in her 60s.

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/beauty/the-grey-matter-2306506.html#ixzz0xRkSD33l

Prayers for Bobby

WHEN Mary Griffith was a teenager in the 1960s, she never heard the words gay or homosexual. “People would be described as sissies,” she says. “That was the word we used – and I wasn’t even sure what that meant.”

Astonishing then that Mary would later become a leading figure in the American gay rights movement - and more astonishing still for the fact that when her own son Bobby told her he was gay, she thought it was an “evil” of which he could be “cured”. She sent Bobby to Bible school and a Christian counsellor in the hope that her God would turn him away from, as she saw it, a road that would lead to hell.
At the age of 20, Bobby Griffith threw himself from a freeway bridge in front of an 18-wheel truck.

Prayers for Bobby, a movie starring Sigourney Weaver, chronicles this tragic story and how Bobby’s suicide led Mary to re-examine the homophobic values she had been brought up with. The film shows tomorrow (that was August 1) in Dublin, one of the highlights of the 18th annual GAZE Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.

It is based on a book that Washington Post journalist Leroy Adams wrote with Mary on her journey from blind intolerance to becoming an advocate for parents supporting their gay children. When the film was first aired on American TV last year, Mary said it was incredibly difficult to watch Weaver’s portrayal of the person she used to be.

“Daniel (Sladek, executive producer) brought the film to us and we went to my friend’s house to show it,” says Mary, on the phone from her home in Walnut Creek, California. “My granddaughter turned to me and asked, ‘Were you really like that?’ And I said, that, yes, that was the truth. I thought I was doing the right thing at the time. She has only known me after Bobby died and I’m so happy that I am who I am now for her.”

Who Mary is now – an active member of the American organisation PFLAG, which helps parents to support their gay and lesbian children – is far removed from Mary, the suburban mom whose world imploded when her 16-year-old son Bobby told her he was gay.

“It frightened me,” she says. “Gay people were invisible for me; I had no context for them. We lived in Danville, California at the time in a close, religious community. I was very confident that God was going to cure Bobby. I thought he’d go to a Christian counsellor and be cured.

“Bobby didn’t go there very long – he felt it was a waste of time. I still remember what he said: that he wanted to be the kind of person God wanted him to be. Looking back on it now, he already was what God wanted him to be. He was perfect but I couldn’t see that.”

This was the early 1980s and the sort of “conversion therapy” that Mary describes was beginning to take a foothold in evangelical Christian America. Groups like the Love in Action ministry purported that sexual orientation was a choice and that gay people could be “turned off” homosexuality through counselling and the power of prayer.

In some cases, horrific aversive treatments have been used in an attempt to “convert” gay people; electric shocks and nausea-inducing drugs administered at the same time as showing the “patient” homoerotic images.

The American Psychiatric Association and the Canadian Psychological Association have both stated that “conversion” is mentally impossible as being gay is not a learned behaviour. Just this month, the British Medical Association branded gay conversion therapy as thoroughly harmful.

Mary Griffith says that it took a few years after Bobby died before she could leave the dogma of her religious upbringing behind her to understand who her son had been. “God didn’t cure Bobby because there was nothing wrong with him,” she says simply.

Most heartbreaking of all was her discovery of Bobby’s old diary, in which he records his anguish at being misunderstood and alienated.
“The most outstanding thing that Booby wrote was that he was always so afraid and angry that people didn’t understand him and that he was frightened young man and angry at the world,” says Mary.

“It wasn’t of comfort to read the diary but it helped me realise why he was so angry and so upset. I could see that everything I was doing was pushing him away.”
She spoke to other religious ministers outside her own evangelical Christian community, including those of the Metropolitan Community Church which was open to gay members of the congregation. She discovered that Bobby had even attended a few of their meetings.

“I had a dream after Bobby died of Bobby as a small baby. In the dream, I was focused on his head and it came to me that this is what I had been missing. It is all there, our psychology, our personality, our sexuality, when we are born. Bobby hadn’t changed and become gay, he was born that way and it was natural.”

By the time Bobby died, he had moved to the larger city of Portland in Oregon where he had found a boyfriend and was living openly as a gay man. He had become estranged from his family back at home, something that Mary, now 74, still bitterly regrets almost 30 years on. “I just wouldn’t give in and I’ll always have a problem with that,” she says.

“Lies destroyed Bobby, and ignorance. It has gotten easier with time and I can sense Bobby’s presence every now and then. But the thing I want other parents of gay children to know is that they are a lifeline. Their children need their support, they need their family behind them.”

After years of campaigning to help young gay people in the way she hadn’t managed to help Bobby, she feels some sense of peace. “I just felt I had to do that. I felt that it’s never too late to right an injustice done to another human being.”

When she was approached about the possibility of turning her story into a movie, she saw it as an opportunity for others to learn from her mistakes. Oscar-winning actress Sigourney Weaver was moved enough to visit Mary in her Californian home.

“I had a lot of questions,” says Weaver. “I wanted to be sure that I could tell Mary's story, that I understood it. I needed to sit down with her myself and ask, ‘Who were you that you could so close your eyes and ears to what Bobby was suffering?’ She was very generous with me, very forthcoming.”

At the end of the film, as Sigourney leads a gay pride march for PFLAG in San Francisco, Mary and her husband Bob have a cameo role as supporters in the crowd. It’s ironic, thinks Mary, because she used to watch those marches on the television news before she lost Bobby and wondered how those parents could support their children in being gay.

When she eventually joined PFLAG, some of her extended family had a problem with it. “I had to question the Bible and it was a very scary thing for me. But nothing happened, God didn’t strike me down.”

Are we all white, there?

The bride wore white and the groom wore a proud grin from ear to ear.

The photograph of Brian O'Driscoll and Amy Huberman in the porch of a church in Leitrim in their finery is shaping up to be the most reproduced wedding pic of the year.

The image of a beloved sportsman and his beautiful bride subscribes to all the fantasies. It's easy to imagine this generation of Irish girls studying the picture of Amy in a princess-skirted dress, and vowing: one day, my prince too shall come.

It's not entirely about pulling Prince Charming: for girls, little and not-so-little, it's mostly about The Dress. We know that the wedding has not gone out of fashion. More than 19,000 couples will tie the knot in Ireland this year. One might assume, however, that the traditional white frock might be going the same way as the dowry.

After all, our society has changed immeasurably in the past 20 years. Many people have cohabited before marriage. Some have bought houses or already have children. Certainly, it's a given that there are not too many virgins walking down the aisle these days, any more than there's a virgin groom waiting for them at the altar. Yet the big white/ivory/cream/any-shade-of-pale dress is still the focus of the big day for the majority of brides.

Even Sarah Jessica Parker has admitted that she regrets wearing a black dress to wed husband Matthew Broderick. "I would white it up," she said in 2008. "I'd wear a beautiful, proper wedding dress, like I should have that day." Ciara Elliott, editor of bridal magazine Confetti, says: "The big, white dress endures as the key element for most Irish brides. You can wear a beautiful dress for any nice occasion, but you only get to put on the white dress once and I think people feel special when they put it on."

It's this transformative effect that relationship counsellor David Kavanagh says is key to why most Irish women live modern, unfussy lives -- but have no problem becoming Princess Di for their wedding day. In his experience in running pre-marriage guidance courses, Kavanagh has noticed that Irish women are still very much influenced by traditional expectations of what 'looking like a bride' will do for them.

"Wearing that white dress conforms to the fantastical notion of beauty we would have had from when we had fairy tales told to us as children by our parents," he says. "When people put these dresses on, they feel a sense of joy because endorphins are released as they tap back into those good memories of being told that this is the happy ending." For some brides, the psychology of wearing the white dress is simple: it's easier to wear,

than not to. "Some people wear alternatives but they are a small percentage," says Ciara. "We are a traditional country and when it comes down to it, people feel pressure to do the traditional thing. I knew a woman who was going to wear a pink dress, but her mum was horrified and she buckled."

It's not just pushy mums who are at it. Celebrity PR agent Joanne Byrne said in an interview last month that when her client Cecelia Ahern had her secret wedding, the media were obsessed with one detail. "The only question I asked the couple was who did Cecelia's dress, as I was being inundated with that question," she said. (Oscar de la Renta, if you're interested.)

The irony is that the white wedding dress might be seen as a tradition -- but it's not as time-honoured as we think. Blue was traditionally associated with purity, but, in fact, the earliest wedding gowns tended to be in plush, luxurious colours, like purple and red. In the Middle Ages, such expensive coloured dyes showed that the bride was coming from a family with money. The value of her purity was second to her value in cash.

Social media agony aunt Amanda Brown wore a strapless, linen two-piece to her civil wedding. "I couldn't wear the traditional white dress," she says. "I find that convention oppressive. You are dressing yourself up as chattel: it's a tradition I could do without being a part of."

There are some changes afoot in the world of bridalwear, however. Some cash-conscious ladies are steering away from the dressing-up box clearly marked 'Bridal'.

"The special dress has retained its value in the same way as the engagement ring has," says Tanya Grimson, stylist and fashion editor at Irish Brides. "But I am being asked a lot by readers: 'Who could make me something bespoke?' Designers who are not bridal designers are being asked to create something because people want to be able to wear it again.

"There will always be the die-hard traditionalist who wants the tiara, the veil, the pearls and the Gina shoes. But the long veil is gone for most brides. The idea of unveiling yourself to your husband, as if there is no sex before marriage ... oh, please."

IT'S NOT ALL WHITE
Meet some brides who chose an alternative to the big, white wedding dress.

BARBARA SCULLY Home-maker, writer and blogger

"I was 34 when I married, so I felt I was quite old -- well, relatively. I also already had a daughter. I didn't go for subtle, though: I wore a Grecian-style traffic-light-red dress. I'm 6ft tall and when I came down the stairs at home that morning, my two brothers said, 'Jesus, you're Mighty Aphrodite'. It must run in the family. My mother got married in a red suit in the 1960s."
PRISCILLA DIAMOND Financial controller

"Being from Galway but getting married in Kildare, I thought it would be nice to bring the Galway colours with me. I didn't try on any all-white dresses, but I did have a few panic attacks as the big day got closer, wondering if people would wonder, 'What was she thinking with that dress?' But I loved it and it was the dress for me."

MICHELLE WYATT Soap-maker

"I didn't go for the traditional white dress because I'm not a 'traditional' person. I got married in a cave (Wookey Hole in Somerset, England), in November. I also think the whole white dress thing is a bit dated. It's meant to symbolise purity, and I think it's quite safe to say that nowadays most brides are not still virgins by their wedding day."

SOOZI HADJ LAZIB Project co-ordinator

"As I married my husband in his family home in Algeria, I wore traditional dress -- but it was a traditional Berber dress, as his family are of Berber [original ethnic group of North Africa] stock. I have definitely loved having more colourful pictures to look back on and show friends."

AISLING McGRANE PRO for Project Arts Theatre

"I love well-tailored clothes and have always loved the '40s look, so I guess it was inevitable I would be drawn to this dress. I saw it in Costume and I also thought that champagne was more flattering on the skin than traditional white. I chose a dress that I was comfortable in and can wear again, if I choose to."

ANNIE WEST Illustrator

"I just wasn't into the thought of a meringue, so, exasperated with trying to find something, I ended up spending a cool 40 quid on a lovely dress from an Indian shop and dressed up a very plain hat. I bought two dresses in Marks and Spencer for the bridesmaids Anna and my daughter Amy [also in the picture and now 19]. They were a bit too new-looking, so I soaked them in tea overnight to get a nice sepia effect."

-Susan Daly

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/fashion/pure-nostalgia-white-weddings-2262743.html
AND HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/fashion/its-not-all-white-2264396.html

Page one girls

Women's magazines have always been a competitive market, growing increasingly so as impulse buys at the newsstand dwindle and each has to jostle for attention on the shelves. I had a look at what Irish mag editors believe catches the consumer's eye.
Interesting factoid: Women don't like men on their magazine covers, not even Justin Timberlake. Read on....


Celebrities are so approachable these days. You can spend your lunch hour with Glenda Gilson, take Cheryl Cole on the train to Cork and have a sit down and a glass of wine with Lorraine Keane. At a few euro a pop, they're cheap company too.

The celebs are not actually for hire in person, but they are available to pick up at any newsstand. Magazine editors know that celebrity cover girls sell copies and that some sell better than others.

The editor of Vogue recently named Kate Moss as her guaranteed crowd-puller; the more mid-range title Glamour says that Cheryl Cole is "the new [Princess] Diana in terms of sales".

Cheryl is a hit, apparently, because she's easy to relate to, dresses trendily but not too outre and, with her dimpled smile, looks like she's auditioning to be our friend. We're drawn to reach out for anything with her on the cover in the same way it's impossible to resist popping a length of bubble wrap. She's got that touchability factor.

"There is an element of trial and error in finding out who attracts readers," says Irish Tatler editor Jessie Collins. "But Irish women seem to like people who they feel an affinity with. They like strong, bright Irish women. Colette Fitzpatrick has worked well for us in the past, and I think Lorraine Keane is maybe the only person we've had on two covers.

"The presentation of them as smiling, approachable and not super-intimidating is attractive."

Time was when only models were deemed the perfect cover girls. These days, even high-fashion bible Vogue consistently plumps for a red-hot celebrity over the chiselled cheekbones of some beautiful -- but anonymous -- model.

Prudence magazine editor Annette O'Meara says that she called a halt a year ago to the policy of putting the model from their fashion shoot on the cover. "We really haven't looked back," she says. "Our sales went up last year -- part of that is to do with our content, which is geared to recessionary living, but it also coincided with when we started putting Irish celebrities on our cover. Our first one was Glenda Gilson and she was incredibly popular."

Perhaps it's down to a prurient interest in Gilson's chequered love life -- she's had high-profile dalliances with rugby star Brian O'Driscoll and property player Johnny Ronan -- or simply a matter of her photogenic face and body.

Whatever it is, Gilson is clearly a source of public fascination and that is a big cover-girl credential. A picture of her flashing her pearly-white smile in a bright-pink dress gave Stellar magazine one of its highest-selling issues ever.

British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman has said that even though her magazine features some seriously daring outfits in its fashion spreads, the cover girls are never wearing anything too in-your-face. Bright colours such as pink help our eye to focus on one mag over another when confronted by such a huge choice on the shelves.

Pink dress aside, Prudence's O'Meara believes Gilson has "broad appeal" to readers. "When people are on TV five days a week, they have a broad recognition factor. Our current edition has Claudia Carroll, who is a very popular author and is also known from her stint in Fair City." Carroll played unlucky-in-love Nicola in the soap for 14 years.

Gilson has also done the business for the fortnightly U magazine. "Glenda and in fact all the girls from Xposé are very popular," says U's editor Jennifer Stevens.

Does this mean we magazine fans are a terribly shallow bunch, only interested in looking at women who are on the telly and wear pretty dresses? Irish Tatler's Collins thinks we're more sophisticated than that. "The reason the cover is so important to get right is that women have complicated tastes," she says. "There is an element of trial and error in it, but it does seem that readers want to see someone who, yes, ties in with them but also whose life is of interest."

News-driven magazines such as U, for example, find Cheryl Cole has indeed been a popular cover girl in the past six months, but only when there is a strong story to put alongside her picture.

"With online news content and access to paparazzi pictures, readers are very discerning and up to date," says Stevens. "Our next cover is Cecelia Ahern because of her secret wedding -- we are probably closer to Grazia and Look in England than to other Irish mags because, for us, the story drives who goes on the cover as much as a picture we might have of them."

There are some rules that editors stick to. Apparently, we like our cover girls to make eye contact with us, as if they're saying: 'Take me home! Let's have a girlie night in while I tell you how I keep my husband in line/get my hair so shiny!'

Sombre colours on the cover -- and green, for some reason -- are out. "Rosanna Davison in bright yellow on our most recent issue was our absolute top-selling cover," says Stellar's editor Susan Vasquez. "It was fresh, it was bright, it was vibrant and it jumped off the shelves. Particularly at this time, people are looking for light relief and magazines are a form of escapism and time out."

Prudence magazine conducted an interesting experiment for its March issue. They posted three very different photographs of Gillian Quinn on their website, allowing readers to vote for which one should make the cover.

The winning picture had Quinn, hair soft and feathered, smiling in a flowing, rose-pink chiffon dress. "People voted overwhelmingly for it," says O'Meara.

The first picture had her in an uber-sexy metallic gold dress, cut to the navel, and the third was a black-and-white headshot of Quinn, beautiful but unsmiling.

"It goes back to the fact that while arty photographers don't want people smiling, readers want someone like Gillian, who they feel they can relate to as a mother and wife of a beloved footballer, looking pleasant and appealing."

Bad girls are not entirely out of a cover-girl job. Stellar agonised over putting Angelina Jolie on the cover of an edition in March because of their readers' general sympathies "with Team Aniston".

But because the cover was related to the Pitt-Jolie split rumours circulating at the time, it sold well.

"The only thing I can say with certainty is that putting guys on the cover is a no-no," says Vasquez. When she was editor of Irish teen mag Kiss, they put Justin Timberlake on the cover at the height of his fame. "It just absolutely bombed," she says.

We know men like to look at the ladies but so too, apparently, do the ladies.

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/fashion/secrets-of-the-page-one-girls-2253508.html

When Johnny played Ozzy...

By SUSAN DALY (from last Saturday's Weekend mag in the Irish Independent
WOMEN who look like Scarlett Johansson, wisdom has it, can pretty much do what they like. But even Scarlett might be pushing it with her latest demand. She has decided that she would be just perfect to play wild woman rocker Courtney Love in an upcoming biopic of Love’s tragic husband Kurt Cobain.

Johansson has flirted with a music career previously, recording her breathy vocals on a solo album two years ago. But does that qualify the cushion-lipped actress to play bad girl singer Love? Say what you like about Love but she’s got a wild, passionate energy that it’s hard to imagine the louche, laidback Johansson doing justice to.

Mind you, Love seems to have given her the stamp of approval, already sending the actress the script of the film. But then who – even Courtney Love – doesn’t fantasise about a gorgeous A-lister playing them in the movie of their life? Ozzy Osbourne, for example, recently decided that Johnny Depp is the only man to play him in a biopic. Clearly the drugs have done some lasting damage to Ozzy’s grip on reality.

Who knows? Perhaps Johnny Depp would be on for playing the Prince of Darkness. There is something about movie biopics that is catnip to Hollywood stars. They recognise the whiff of guaranteed Oscar glory if they get them right, as happened for Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles, Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf, Ben Kingsley as Gandhi. Naomi Watts and Michelle Williams must both surely be eyeing the glittering prize when they take on the role of Marilyn Monroe in upcoming rival movies.

Movie bosses are all for the biopic, knowing there is nothing we love more than to watch a famous person play another famous person. When it’s good – Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison, Benicio del Toro as Che Guevara, Angela Bassett as Tina Turner – it’s very, very good. But when it’s bad it’s, well, Hilary Swank as Amelia Earhart.

Last year’s movie Amelia was a hit – on paper: Oscar-winning actress plays free-spirited legendary aviator. On the big screen, it was a dud, with most of the talk of Berry’s wan performance centering on her bad hair and teeth day.

Miscasting movie roles is easily done – Denise Richards as a nuclear scientist in The World is Not Enough, anyone? – but it’s most embarrassing and obvious when it happens in biopics. The 2008 movie How to Lose Friends and Alienate People had a pop at inappropriate casting when sexpot Megan Fox’s actress character lands the role of a lifetime as… Mother Teresa.

Sometimes the travesty is down to a star’s ego being unable to accept that they are wrong for the role. Madonna kept knocking on Alan Parker’s door until she persuaded him to cast her as Eva Peron in Evita, “the role I was born to play” as she called it. Sadly, although Madonna is a great businesswoman and pop hitmaker, she’s not much of an actress. Evita, a musical, also showed up her limitations as a singer.

It could have been worse. In the 1980s squeaky-clean Olivia Newton John was touted to play the manipulative Peron, as was Liza Minnelli – in a blonde wig.
Wigs and fake teeth don’t necessarily fool an audience. Nicole Kidman’s prosthetic nose landed her an Oscar as suicidal author Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2002) but there surely isn’t enough Latex in the world to transform Kidman into soul queen Dusty Springfield. That idea was put about two years ago but the idea of poker-faced Kidman tackling Dusty’s bisexual, drugs-and-drink lifestyle has subsequently sunk without trace.

That’s the problem with getting white-bread stars to play iconic roles. Invariably your average Botoxed, protein-shake-personal-trainer-regime star is never half as interesting as the exciting life they are being asked to portray. All-American boy
Chris O’Donnell as macho, boozy, bullfighting author Ernest Hemingway? Please. Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig as doomed poet Sylvia Plath and womanizing Ted Hughes had, as one critic put it, “all the sexual chemistry of a couple of bored professors”.

Paltrow in particular is guilty of getting ideas above her station. The yoga bunny is being talked about to portray Marlene Dietrich, a bisexual cabaret-cruiser who had more lovers than Paltrow has had wheatgrass shots.

Then there are those actors who can’t bear the thought of ‘uglying up’ enough to accurately portray a real-life person. Hollywood reimagining ‘plain Jane’ Austen as the doe-eyed Anne Hathaway in Becoming Jane. Children’s author Beatrix Potter got a bosom-heaving turn from Renee Zellwegger in Miss Potter.

Julia Roberts apparently intended to persuade us that she was feminist icon Andrea Dworkin in a 2005 film. (Yes, Pretty Woman Julia Roberts, whose most famous role insisted that becoming a prostitute was a valid way to bag a rich husband, as a feminist icon.)

When an icon is dead and half-forgotten for long enough, it should theoretically be easier to get an audience to believe in an actor’s portrayal of them. Scottish freedom fighter William Wallace will always be Mel Gibson in a kilt to me, for example.

Even so, it’s remarkable how we know when something is just not right even when a historical figure is hidden in the mists of time. We might be a bit hazy on the feats of Alexander the Great, but we’re fairly sure he wasn’t a mummy’s boy with blond highlights a la Colin Farrell.

The best thing is probably for a star to play it safe and portray someone whose life is extraordinary but largely unknown until a film is made about them. Ms Roberts finally got it right when she won an Oscar for playing single-mom campaigner Erin Brockovich, as did Sean Penn when he portrayed gay rights activist Harvey Milk.

And yet, as sure as Tom Cruise will one day decide he wants to play L Ron Hubbard in Alien 5: The Story of Scientology, there will always be bad casting decisions. We don’t have far to look: Kate Winslet is being tipped to play Natascha Kampusch, the Austrian girl kidnapped and kept in a cellar for 8 years. Winslet is a good actress but playing a 10-year-old girl? She’s not that good.

SPITTING IMAGE – Who should play who in the movies of their lives…
NELSON MANDELA
Who has played him: Morgan Freeman in Invictus (2009).
Who should play him: Morgan Freeman. Invictus was too lacklustre to do the role any justice. We say: give Morgan another script – and another chance.
COURTNEY LOVE
Who wants to play her: Scarlett Johansson in upcoming biopic of Kurt Cobain.
Who should play her: Courtney Love. There is no-one else wild enough to play her and she has already proven she can bring a real person to life with her electric performance as Althea, wife to porn boss Larry Flynt. Johansson in turn could play Marilyn Monroe – she has the curves that Naomi Watts and Michelle Williams don’t in their upcoming biopics of her.
EVA PERON
Who has played her: Madonna in the musical movie Evita (1996)
Who should have played her: Cher. No, really. In movies like Moonstruck and Mask, she was equally able to portray vulnerability and strength, a cocktail of which is what made Peron so charismatic. And it’s easy to picture her belting out Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina from a balcony, albeit in a spangly leotard.
DUSTY SPRINGFIELD
Who has been touted to play her: Nicole Kidman, Amy Winehouse.
Who should play her: Winehouse would be a good choice apart from concerns over her ability to turn up on set every day. Chloe Sevigny does troubled yet kinky very well – and she does look well in a beehive.
ELVIS
Who has played him: Kurt Russell, playing Elvis in a 1979 movie, wouldn’t even have come fifth in an Elvis lookalike contest in Vegas.
Who should play him: He already has – our own Jonathan Rhys Meyers earned plaudits for playing a young Elvis in a TV series recently. Let’s see that curled lip and snake hips on the big screen.

Come out with your hands up

From last Saturday's Weekend magazine in the Irish Independent
By Susan Daly


Remember that old kiddies' rhyme,"Heads, shoulders, knees and toes"? We didn't know it then, twirling around on our dainty little toes and smooth, youthful pins, but that rhyme was prophetic.

In the age of body consciousness, we've come to obsess over every minute part of ourselves. It started with facelifts. The nip and tuck is no longer the preserve of the ageing Hollywood starlet: it's now a high-street commodity.

In Ireland, we spend roughly the same amount on cosmetic procedures a year -- €55m -- as we do on our supposed national obsession, tea bags.

As the spotlight on the perfect figure grows stronger, no body part is safe from scrutiny. The focus now intensifies steadily from head to toe. Demi Moore got a kneelift when she decided her patellas were less than perfect. Fashion victims found fault with their feet and started injecting derma fillers into their soles to help them stand upright in skyscraper stilettos.

Now it's hands that are under fire. Sarah Jessica Parker, often pilloried for her unconventional looks, is taking a battering for her "bony" fingers. Pictures of her at the recent premiere of Sex and the City 2 were accompanied by bitchy critiques of the "bulging veins" on her hands and arms. The usual unmerciful comments about having the face of a horse were replaced by jibes about having the hands of a man.

Marie Claire magazine found her mitts so unsightly that they did a complete Photoshop job on them for the cover of their June edition. They were plumped up and smoothed out, with no protruding knuckles and no throbbing veins.

Cameron Diaz and Angelina Jolie have also suffered the barbs of the 'granny hands' police for having less than dainty digits. In a mild foreshadow of what was to come, Diaz was lambasted some years back for turning up to the Oscars with chipped nail polish. Anything but top-to-toe perfection is inexcusable on the red carpet.

Now she's accused of sacrificing her hands to her surfing hobby, letting them shrivel up and roughen in the sea and sun of the Californian coast. Jolie's skinny hands are often ringfenced as proof that it may not be possible to be too rich, but it is possible to be too thin.

This sudden focus on the hands is certainly linked with the overall body-beautiful obsession. Even Kate Moss has used a hand double for close-up shots in a Rimmel make-up advertisement. Ironically, the ad was for Renew and Lift foundation. The tagline? Look and feel years younger.

Social critic and psychotherapist Susie Orbach, author of Bodies, says: "Our bodies are increasingly being experienced as objects to be honed and worked on. What I am seeing is franticness about having to get a body. I wish we could treat our bodies as the place we live from, rather than regard it as a place to be worked on, as though it were a disagreeable old kitchen in need of renovation and update."

The result is that an aggressive anti-ageing campaign on the face and body shows up a pair of withering hands like never before. Madonna, for example, has the body of a teenager, the face of a twentysomething, but the hands of a middle-aged woman. Her hands are the age they should be, but they look weird because they don't match the rest of her preternaturally youthful bits and bobs.

Columnist Julie Burchill, writing to "celebrate" Madonna's 50th birthday in 2008, said: "I know I'm fat, but I have to say that if I spent four hours a day working out, I'd want to look a damn sight hotter than Madonna does; those vile, veiny hands, that sad stringy neck -- yuck."

That's the sisterhood for you.

Teri Hatcher, incidentally the same age as SJP at 45, has similarly been roasted for letting the appearance of her hands betray her full age. They might be holding back the years on their faces, but the hands are giving the game away.

Comedian Lucille Ball once suggested that the secret to staying young-looking was to live well, eat slowly and "lie about your age". That's not so easy when your hands are doing the talking for you.

Cosmetic doctor Katherine Mulrooney, of The Clinic in Dublin's Sandymount Green, says she's not surprised hands have become the telltale mark of a person's true age and lifestyle. "People were mostly concerned with their face, neck and chest area up to now," she says. "But the hands are constantly being used and abused. The poor old hands get a terrible hammering."

Even exercise -- so vital for a celebrity's slim-line credentials -- is a vice when it comes to how it makes the hands look. Overzealous cardio workouts increase blood flow and can lead to enlarged veins. Coupled with low body fat, they are both more prominent and easily noticed.

Up until recently, not much could be done about it. Josephine Allen, manicurist to stars such as Julia Roberts and Heidi Klum, says the most she could give her clients was this homespun gem: "If you want to look younger, hold your hands up -- sit with them raised during dinner so the blood flows down and veins appear smaller."

Hands are just too difficult to operate on. The practicalities are that hands can't afford to be frozen or made any way immobile by the traditional surgical 'lifts'. The increasing demand for youthful paws to match frozen-in-time faces, however, has motivated the cosmetic industry to find alternatives.

What it has come up with are topical treatments to treat sun damage, and injectable fillers or fat from elsewhere on a person's body to plump out the hands and make them look fuller and less gaunt.

"The hands are one of the most sun-exposed sites," says Dr Mulrooney. "Photo damage counts for a lot of the manifestation of skin-ageing; collagen breaks down, the hand appears more bony, the skin crepey and the skin acquires sun-damage brown spots. What has happened now is that the more they do to rejuvenate their faces, the more they notice their hands by contrast."

Dr Mulrooney says fillers injected between the metacarpals are becoming popular, as are intense pulsed light (IPL) lasers or fractionalised lasers carried out over a course of a couple of months to treat unwanted pigmentation. A full hand makeover will run you into thousands of euro.

"At the moment, it's a bit like the toe surgery some people have to fit into their fancy designer shoes," she says. "It's never going to be as massive a thing as Botox, but there's definitely a demand for it."

Vivian Diller, a psychotherapist who wrote about women's feelings on ageing in her recent book Face It, wonders, though, if the eternal pursuit for youth is as good for our mind as for our toned-up body parts.

"I have a client who is a cosmetic surgeon," she says. "He talks about how strange it is to treat an 80-year-old who has the breasts of a 20-year old. Body parts are out of sync. How do women feel when parts of their body look young and other parts don't? The psychology of this is not being talked about."

For those not yet willing to put their hands in a doctor's hands, you can take the less worrisome precautions of sunblock and moisturising.

Or if the damage is done, constantly wearing a pair of white cotton gloves might make you look as if you're auditioning for My Fair Lady, but you'll be keeping your hands -- and age -- to yourself.

Read more: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/beauty/come-out-with-your-hands-up-2227387.html#ixzz0rW0fCS8O

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/beauty/come-out-with-your-hands-up-2227387.html

Next-of-kin: Sybil Mulcahy and best pal Lizzie Lynch

TV presenter SYBIL MULCAHY and best friend LIZZIE LYNCH

TV viewers are used to the sight of Sybil Mulcahy sparking off her male co-presenter Martin King on TV3’s The Morning Show. But while the pair have been entertaining fans with their on-screen chemistry for the past year, in reality Sybil is all about having a good set of girlfriends.

“There are about eight of us who are still close and in touch from our school days and Lizzie is chief among them,” she says of best pal Lizzie Lynch. The pair met when they both moved to the same primary school at the age of ten. “We didn’t know anyone else so we gravitated towards each other,” says Sybil.

Lizzie feels the pair actually had a lot in common from the get-go. They are both from large families headed by strong matriarchies. Lizzie adds: “I think it was probably expected of both of us that we’d become lawyers and marry doctors!”

The career paths they did take put thousands of miles between them in their early 20s. Lizzie, who works for Goldman Sachs, lived in London for many years. “I still don’t have a clue what her job entails,” confesses Sybil, “I just know that it involved a lot of jetsetting and she earns about four times what I do.”

Lizzie claims they are both impressed with each other’s success. “Mine is the serious boring job but Sybil’s is much more glamorous.”

When Lizzie was in London, Sybil ended up in the States for five years. “She met a guy there and started doing TV work, so we thought we were going to lose Sybil to Ohio,” says Lizzie.

However, both girls ended up back in Dublin and fell easily back into the friendship. “I think it’s not just a case of shared history,” says Lizzie. “Sybil and I genuinely enjoy each other’s company and when we’re together we can get back to who we are.”

Sybil insists that she was “the messer” of the two of them in school. “I was suspended from school for two weeks once but she wasn’t bold at all. She would have been very academic and kept the head down.”

Lizzie argues: “Neither of us were model pupils. We were BOTH suspended at different stages. It was nothing malicious, just high spirits, and coming towards the end of the six years we knuckled down. Actually Sybil was a very good netball player in school.”

Now both women have families of their own – Sybil has two children and Lizzie has three – but see each other at the weekends. “We both love drinking wine, having a laugh, shopping,” says Sybil.

Their lively relationship is not untouched by the odd argument. “Mostly after a few drinks,” they chime.

“The only time we row is about politics,” says Sybil. “We had some humdingers about that. She would always have been a real Fianna Fail head during the Celtic Tiger and I would be going on about corruption and brown envelopes.”

Lizzie says the disagreements are healthy because they are both honest and open types. “Sybil wears her heart on her sleeve but she doesn’t bear a grudge.

“Most of all she’s just great fun. When I was her bridesmaid with another friend, we got a Wonder Woman outfit for her to wear on her hen. With someone else you might have to bully them into it but Sybil needed no persuasion. The boots were on in minutes, the cape over the shoulder, bold as brass. She is just as much fun as she was when we were kids.”
ENDS

Next-of-kin: The bumper issue! Peter Sheridan, Louise Lennox and Katherine Lynch

A few pieces from my Next-of-Kin series for the Weekend magazine were published while I was away, so here's who you (and I) may have missed!

Playwright PETER SHERIDAN and son FIACHRA
Peter Sheridan has moulded his life around the arts. He and brother Jim founded the Project Theatre Company in Dublin in the early 1970s, Peter going on to become a prolific playwright and author and Jim directing films like My Left Foot, The Field and In The Name of The Father.

“Our dad introduced us to the theatre when we were teenagers and we just fell in love with this medium even though we had been playing music, we had been in a garage band together,” says Peter.

Despite this familial way with words, Peter was surprised when his youngest son Fiachra approached him with a draft of his first book, a memoir called The Runners. It was published last year.

“I was very surprised when Fiachra started writing because of all my four kids I would have least expected him to,” says Peter. “My daughter Doireann always had a strong interest in my work, but the conversation between me and Fiachra would have been more like, ‘Isn’t it terrible Liverpool were beaten 3-1 yesterday?’”

There was no-one more surprised than Fiachra. He had a chequered career in his 20s, spanning a spell as League of Ireland footballer and a hedge fund manager and, eventually, his current day job as a maths teacher. “I went through a lot to realise teaching was what I loved,” says Fiachra. He wrote The Runners at weekends and in the holidays, and is currently working on a sequel.

“For the whole of my 20s, I really hadn’t a clue what I was doing. I think now: How did Dad achieve so much in that time? He had four kids in his 20s. I was nearly 30 when I had my first.”

Peter and Jim had just turned 20 when they founded the Project. Fiachra thinks his experiences of growing up in an artistic environment might have delayed the bite of the writing bug.

“I hated the arts and all I wanted to do was play football,” he says. “All I saw was the Project and actors sitting around drinking coffee and going to rehearsals. As a kid, rehearsals are inherently boring. When you’re a kid, you rebel against everything your father does.”

Peter, although committed to the arts, understood his son’s reluctance. “To be honest, I would have much preferred if they became footballers because that’s what I wanted when I was a kid, maybe play for Man United,” he says.

Neither, says Fiachra, did the financial insecurity of a career in the arts appeal.
“They (children Doireann, Ross, Fiachra and Nuala) always felt that the arts equaled poverty and they were right,” says Peter, “We were living on very small pickings in the 1970s and 80s. We lived in a very small house in Ballybough, I remember my two daughters sharing a bedroom that you could barely fit the bunk bed in.”

These days, Fiachra can see his dad’s house from the bedroom window of the north Dublin home he shares with his wife and their two small children. In the back garden, his six-month-old son Julen is gurgling at his granddad.

“When he became a father, I felt it was this huge bonding thing in the family,” says Peter. “You feel that thing of life starting again, of the circle continuing. It’s been a big bonding thing for us and has deepened our relationship in the past few years.”

The writing too has brought them together. “When Fiachra came to me with his first attempts, I was so taken aback. He has that gift of expressing something in a very unaffected manner.”

Praise from a proud father? Fiachra demurs. “I know the most honest opinion I will get will be from him. I don’t fear showing him something and him telling me it’s crap. That’s alright.”
• Peter Sheridan directs The Shawshank Redemption at the Gaiety Theatre Dublin until May 29.


TV chef LOUISE LENNOX and her sister NICOLA
When pastry chef Louise Lennox appears on RTE’S The Restaurant, sister Nicola is often carefully watching. Not to see Louise keep the visiting celebrity cooks in line - but to check that Nicola’s clothes are not making a surprise appearance on TV.

“My flatmate is convinced Louise has a key to our place and she comes up when we’re not there and raids our wardrobes,” says Nicola. “It’s when she wears the stuff to cook in that it annoys me. They get destroyed. She gets chocolate everywhere!”
Nicola, a nanny, tuned in one day to see Louise do a cookery demo on The Afternoon Show. “I was making a sandwich for the little girl I was minding and told her to tell me when Lou Lou was on the telly. She comes running in saying, ‘Nicky, Lou Lou is wearing a pair of your earrings!’”

Apart from the issue of accessories gone AWOL, their relationship as adults is much more stable than it was as children. The youngest two of five, there was a substantial gap between Nicola and Louise and their older siblings. As a result, they were both “the babies” of the household.

“We were as thick as thieves because we shared a room together,” says Louise, “But then we’d kill each other and be best friends an hour later.”
When they fought, they’d fight ferociously. “Oh, hair-pulling and biting and scraping,” says Nicola, “We each had our signature moves. I would start to cry and Louise would give me one of her sweets if I wouldn’t tell Mum, and I’d be like, ‘Okay’.”

Two very difficult times in their lives pushed the childish battles behind them. Both girls were diagnosed with dyslexia as youngsters. While Nicola felt her secondary school was supportive, Louise felt no-one but her siblings could really understand the frustration and embarrassment she suffered as a result of her reading difficulties.

“It’s kind of how I got into cookery,” says Louise. “I used to stutter through reading assignments so my teacher let me figure out recipes from a cookbook my aunt gave me when I was ten and bake a cake for my homework. That was great – it gave me self-belief.”

She needed that confidence when she started secondary school, a different one to that which Nicola attended.

“The teacher would make me stand up and read and I’d have panic attacks, feeling this heaviness all around me. I couldn’t even read words like ‘the’ and ‘these’, which I normally could. I bunked off school a lot so I wouldn’t have to read aloud.”

Then, when Louise was 17, her best friend Janice died in an accident.
“Louise is two and a half years older than me and that was a huge age gap when I was 14, but when Janice died it drove us closer together,” says Nicola.
“From the day Janice died, I used to sleep on Louise’s floor,” says Nicola.

Louise takes up the story: “Because I was afraid to sleep on my own. Scared Janice would come down to say, I’m okay!’ It was okay for me to cry around Nicky. I’m really weird about letting people see me cry, but I felt comfortable in her space and then we developed a friendship on a whole new level.”

Louise describes Nicola as “really caring” – she does a lot of voluntary work outside her job as a nanny – and for her part, Nicola is proud of her sister’s TV work but knows it’s not for her.

“Our parents never compared us to each other,” says Louise, “There’s never been sibling rivalry in that way.”
Nicola thinks for a moment and adds: “The only thing I would be really jealous of is if she got to do something with Westlife. I really like them and she just wouldn’t appreciate it!”


Comedy actress KATHERINE LYNCH and best friend WARREN MEYLER
ONLY a very, very good friend can persuade a woman to burst out of a costume shaped like a sanitary product in front of a packed auditorium.

That was the test of friendship set for TV comedy star Katherine Lynch by her best pal and co-writer Warren Meyler – and she passed. As the only woman among a chorus of men entering Alternative Miss Ireland in 1998, Katherine had to stand out. She chose a drag alter-ego, Tampy Lilette, who she describes as a periodically-obsessed country and western singer.

“So we had her burst out of a giant tampon onto the stage, saying, ‘Sorry I’m a little late!’” laughs Warren.
“I was going, ‘What is that?’ when he suggested it,” says Katherine, “And Warren was saying, ‘It’s a tampon. Just get into it’.”

The pair take their comedy quite seriously now. They run their own production company, Waka, which created the RTE2 series Single Ladies and Wonderwomen, with Katherine the performer and Warren producer, director and co-writer.

Their shared comedy roots go back to the mid-1990s when they first met but it wasn’t exactly friendship at first sight. Warren was working in a late-night café in Temple Bar called Smalltalk – “a real whiskey-in-the-teapot place” – when Katherine started as a waitress.

“We hated each other at first,” he said. “I thought she was weird, and she thought I was weird.” (Katherine interrupts: “He WAS weird. Warren was a Michael Jackson fan and he moonwalked everywhere.” For the record, Warren denies this. Strongly.)

Working nights proved a bonding experience. “We used to have people on shift work coming in, from doctors to U2 and Boyzone,” says Katherine. “One night Quentin Tarantino and Mira Sorvino came in and stayed till six in the morning because we doused them in whiskey. I sang Caledonia for Mira and she cried… in pain.”

They “settled into each other” and discovered a mutual love of kitsch, slapstick humour.

“We shared a flat together on Parliament Street and when we were broke we’d be sitting in and doing sketches and that’s how we ended up writing comedy together,” says Warren.

Over a decade on, Warren and Katherine still socialise and work together. They say their romantic partners are very understanding of their close friendship. Ask if that was always the case in the past and they laugh. “There have been one or two situations like that but someone who is threatened by your friendships isn’t right for you,” says Warren.

They are currently holed up in an office together writing material for Katherine’s live shows in Vicar Street this August. (“And Warren’s doing my VAT for me,” adds Katherine.) Don’t they ever get on each other nerves? “We laugh loads and we argue loads,” says Katherine.

They are still pals with the Smalltalk gang some of whom, like Brendan Courtney and Declan Buckley (aka Shirley Temple Bar), have also found success in the entertainment biz. They might be all grown-up now but it doesn’t take much prompting to get Katherine and Warren reminiscing about their party days.

“We were adamant we were going to get into the MTV awards when they were in Dublin, do you remember that?” says Warren. They blagged into seats beside Whitney Houston – with Katherine dressed in a floor-length white puffa coat pretending to be a Dublin hip hop star and Warren and a friend as her backing dancers.

“The poor boys were dressed like a pair of gay dancers with bellytops on them,” says Katherine, “I couldn’t take my coat off because I had my work clothes from the restaurant on underneath. I was sweating buckets!” Sounds like a good idea for a comedy sketch…