Ann and Rachel: A tale of two sisters

Sometimes you meet a character so outstanding, courageous and powerful that they make you breathless with humility.

One such person is Rose Callaly, the mother of murdered Rachel O'Reilly. Her other daughter Ann - so often seen propping her family up during the subsequent murder trial of Rachel's husband Joe in 2007 - died of cancer in late September this year. Two days after she buried her lovely Ann, Rose gave me this interview. No-one was more qualified to make the tribute to Rachel and Ann than their wonderful, inspiring mum.


(From the Irish Independent on September 25 last)

JUST before murder victim Rachel O’Reilly was laid to rest in October 2004, Ann Callaly carried out the ultimate sisterly act. She went into Dublin city centre and shopped for clothes in which to bury her darling sister.

Rachel’s own clothes were trapped in the crime scene of her bedroom in The Naul, Co Dublin where she had been brutally murdered by her husband Joe on October 4. She would be laid out in the clothes Ann painstakingly chose for her and was buried on October 11, a day after she should have celebrated her 31st birthday.

It was a horrible reversal of twelve months earlier, when the sisters had celebrated Rachel’s milestone 30th birthday with a girls’ day out. They trawled the shops on Grafton Street with their mother Rose, went for lunch, had fun. They popped into Brown Thomas and Marks and Spencers. Rachel treated herself to some items in Wallis and A-Wear.

They couldn’t have known then that Ann, born four years after Rachel, was destined to pass the age at which her sister is forever frozen in her family’s memory, but only for a tragically short time. Last Monday, 32-year-old Ann Callaly was laid to rest beside her sister in Balgriffin cemetery. She had fought a cancerous tumour behind the eye for over two and a half years.

“It is a comfort that they are together,” says mum Rose Callaly in the family home in Collins Avenue. In a way, Rose feels that Ann never felt far from her late sister.

“I remember that for well over a year before she died, these little hearts used to follow Ann around,” she says. “It started off when I remember she had a cup of coffee and there was a perfect little heart in the froth. That started happening on a regular basis. She would see little hearts on the ground, maybe a piece of paper shaped like one. Another time there was a deformed leaf on the ground in front of us as we were walking and she picked it up; it was a perfect heart shape.

“It was continuous and she said: ‘That’s Rachel’. I have no doubt that they are together.”

All the Callaly siblings are close. Rose and Jim’s youngest son Tony still lives at home; Declan and Paul, the eldest two boys, live nearby with their wives and children, Rose’s “little rays of sunshine”. She says: “The boys never left Ann’s side. Her brothers, God love them, absolutely loved her.”

The five children were all adopted by Rose and Jim as babies but their different biological roots did not separate them. They were bound instead by the upbringing they were given, the adventures they had along the way. When Rachel was 13 and Ann 9, the whole family decamped to Australia for a year. They took the scenic route home to Ireland, swimming at the Great Barrier Reef, spending a week in Hawaii, visiting LA and Disneyland, hiking in Yosemite National Park, taking in the bright lights of Las Vegas.

“We all have amazing memories of that once-in-a-lifetime holiday when we were all together,” Rose noted in the memoir she published last year, Remembering Rachel.
That trip sowed the seed in the sisters of their love of travel. Rachel returned to Australia to visit old friends and her aunt Lucy before her marriage to Joe O’Reilly at the age of 23. When the newlyweds went to Kenya for their honeymoon, an excited Ann met them at the airport on their return, eager to hear their tales.

“Ann was absolutely mad about travel,” says Rose. “We had this long trip planned and up to the very end, she talked about going. She’ll be able to go on all her trips now, but I couldn’t imagine going on this one without her.”

At a vigil for Rachel outside the house in The Naul two years after she was killed, Ann spoke warmly of the childhood they had shared, playing together in Glasnevin Park.

“She was not just a name in the newspaper,” she said in her tribute to her slain sister. “She was vivacious, and larger than life. She was like a gust of wind, her presence filled everywhere she went… She was never shy, and was the life and soul of the party. She had a charisma that grew with her into adulthood.”

By contrast, Ann was a “private person” says Rose, although she was also someone who left an impression on all those who met her. Old colleagues from DCU, where she had worked in her early twenties, kept in contact. In the weeks before Ann died at home on Friday, September 17, her girlfriends had brought her an album of photographs of their nights out, with captions written beneath each one.

“It’s absolutely beautiful to look back and see all the happy times,” says a grateful Rose. “Every photograph she’s in, and every one we have of her, that big smile is there and the eyes lighting.” That too was true of Rachel although her bright smile and open, wide blue eyes were to become tragically iconic to everyone who saw them after her death, in a newspaper or blown up on the TV screen.

Both were outdoorsy girls, athletic and full of energy. Rachel played softball and hockey, Ann was a member of the Aer Lingus badminton club. This year, Ann had started to learn to play golf at Carton House.

“I’ve no doubt that she would have picked it up had she lived to carry on with it,” says Rose. “She didn’t want to leave life, she really didn’t. Until the very last breath that she took, she really thought there would be a miracle. She didn’t even look on it as a miracle, she just thought, ‘This is going to be cured’. I just find it so sad.

“She was just so driven. It’s extraordinary when I look back; Rachel would have been always on the go. I often think is there something in their psyche that lets them know they won’t be here to do it all.”

The cruel full stop to Rachel’s life came first, in the most brutal fashion possible. Her husband Joe, who was having an affair at the time, bludgeoned her to death in their bedroom while their two children were at crèche and school. He engineered the situation so that Rose would be the first to find her daughter’s battered body.

When his murder trial finally began in 2007, Ann was a constant by her mother’s side. Her quiet, stoic presence, her graceful poise and beautiful, sombre face drew the eye in photographs of the family emerging from court, their arms linked.

But hearing the hurts visited on Rachel by her husband, both physical and emotional, drained Ann. In contrast to Joe O’Reilly’s robotic performance in the courtroom, Ann understandably struggled for composure. When Professor Marie Cassidy spent 15 minutes enumerating the injuries to Rachel, Ann sobbed and doubled over, feeling viscerally the final terrible moments of her sister’s life.

When O’Reilly tried to tear Rachel’s reputation as a loving mother and wife apart in a series of hateful emails to his own sister Ann O’Reilly, Ann and Rose clung to each other in tears.

“Life can hurt you along the way and Ann did have her hurts,” adds Rose. “I suppose when her sister died, the stress of that and then all the things around that for a couple of years after, when we went through tremendous stress, I’m sure that contributed to it.”

Ann had looked up to Rachel as her older sister. When she married Joe O’Reilly, Ann had remarked to her mother that she only hoped she would look half as beautiful a bride when it came to be her turn to marry. “She would have loved to have married and had children,” says Rose. “She never really aspired to anything out of the ordinary: she would have just loved to meet someone.”

Poignantly, both Rachel and Ann had ambitions for a future which involved making children happy. Rachel was devoted to her two young sons, just 6 and 4, when she died. After years working in computers with the National Council for the Blind, Ann had secured a place to train as a primary teacher in St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra but had to defer when her cancer returned early this year.

“She was always studying something or other,” says Rose. “She would have loved to do teaching and she didn’t have an honour in Irish so she went back to college and got it. Until the very last, she intended to live and planned and was out and about.

“I think anybody normal would have been in bed three months before with the illness but I think the sheer willpower kept her going. She was always like that but I suppose she threw herself into keeping busy after Rachel died.”

It was a remarkable attitude, considering the despair that Ann herself voiced to Pat Kenny on the Late Late Show in 2006, two years after a brazen-faced Joe O’Reilly had appeared on the show alongside Rose to appeal for Rachel’s killer to come forward.

“Sometime I just don’t enjoy anything anymore,” she had said. “You wake up and think: Is it ever going to get any better? Other times you forget that your family has been torn apart and wake up thinking she’s alive.”

Now it is for Rose, Jim and their sons to face life without either of their girls. “They were our life,” says Rose simply. “Six years might sound a lot to people but it’s not. It’s still very raw. And now with Ann, it’s like a candle that can never be lit again.”

"My mother blamed herself till the day she died."

Last week, a Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman's report on the bombings in Claudy of 1972 accused the Catholic Church and British Government of protecting Fr James Chesney, a local priest suspected of involvement in the massacre. I met some victims of the car bombing for the Irish Independent's Review last Saturday, including Mark Eakin (above) whose 8-year-old sister Kathryn died beside him.


The month of July 1972 had been an idyllic one for Mark Eakin and his sister Kathryn. They had whiled away the hot summer days at the family caravan in Castlerock, a seaside resort on the Derry coastline. On Sunday, July 30, their mother Merle told the children that it was time they headed home to the inland village of Claudy, where the Eakins ran a shop.

The family arrived back in Claudy early the following morning, July 31. At 10.15am, the first of three car bombs detonated on the main street of the village. Kathryn, aged eight, was killed instantly while cleaning the front window of the family shop.

"My mother blamed herself till the day she died for taking us out of Castlerock that day," says Mark Eakin, who was 12 at the time of the bombings. "She could never put it to bed."

This week, Mark joined other survivors and relatives of Claudy bombing victims to hear the Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman's findings. After the report was made public, it was alleged that the British Government, the RUC and the Catholic Church had colluded to protect Derry priest Fr James Chesney, who was suspected to be part of an IRA gang that planted the bombs.

The revelation has not brought peace to those for whom the Claudy atrocity is still an open wound.

Going to this week's meeting was "like going to a funeral", says survivor Mary Hamilton.

Now a UUP councillor for Foyle, Mary was seriously injured when one of the bombs exploded outside the hotel she owned with her husband Ernest in Claudy. She was 31 at the time. "I was so sad on Wednesday because I knew I would be re-living that day," she says. "I felt so bad I dressed in black."

Her memories of that terrible morning are still vivid. When the first bomb went off, she and a neighbour who had just come into the hotel rushed on to the street. "I saw a lady lying without arms and legs, on fire -- she'd been covered with petrol from one of the cars. Another lady, Mrs McLaughlin, who owned the cafe, she was lying with blood pouring out of her head and her daughter saying to me, 'Mary, Mary, help my mother'. Unfortunately, I couldn't help her."

Mary and the other shocked villagers were ushered away from the bomb site -- not realising they were walking straight into the path of the second and third bombs.

"We met the boy of the Temples [William] down the street, it was his first day at work, and he had hurt his hand in the first bomb. A few moments afterwards, he was blown to bits," she says.

"My legs were injured. I still have metal in one leg, it's too deep-seated really, and I suffer every day with it. But I'm here. Saying that, there shouldn't have been bombs. The sights I saw that day, they are sights that never leave you. A good friend of ours, David Miller, was just blown to bits literally beside me."

The second and third bombs had detonated almost simultaneously, one outside the post office and the other outside Mary's hotel, the Beaufort.

"We were given no warning. They had forgotten that two weeks beforehand, they'd blown up the telephone exchange and no one could get through."

For Mark Eakin, too, the smallest details of that day are etched deeply. He was just three yards from Kathryn when the first bomb went off. While she died from a fragment of shrapnel that pierced her brain, he escaped with some minor cuts.

"I had actually just walked past Kathryn," he recalls. "We were messing about, you know, brother and sister sort of stuff. She nearly had the window cleaned and there was a bottle of Windolene sitting on the window ledge beside her. So I lifted it up and skimmed a bit off the top and scooted it along the window.

"I remember she was standing at the top of a set of steps and she was roaring and shouting at me and then the explosion just went off."

The psychological fallout of the bombings remained long after the shattered buildings were patched back together. Mary Hamilton found that for a long time afterwards she would cover her ears with her hands when she walked past a parked car, always afraid that it would blow up.

Mark and Kathryn Eakin's parents, Merle and Billy, both passed away in the last two years, within six months of each other.

"They were never the same again. They never had the same love of life. They had their good days and their bad days, but there were more bad days than good."

On a purely economic level, businesses and homes had been devastated by the three car bombs. Custom was slow to return to the village and both the Beaufort Hotel and Eakin's shop suffered. The Eakins eventually had to sell up. Their structurally frail building was pulled down and new apartments and a few small business units stand in its place.

The compensation packages offered by the British government/Northern Ireland Office at the time were not of much help. "It was a struggle to arrange that compensation," says Mark Eakin. "My father wouldn't settle, he argued, argued, argued with them. But the bank rates were going up, interest rates were sky high, and the whole thing just crippled him and he just had to take it."

The people of Claudy were left to support each other. Five Catholics and four Protestants died in the bombings and the mixed community tried to scramble back to some sense of normality.

"We were very good friends," says Mary Hamilton. "Quite a lot of us had to live in caravans afterwards and if you had a stool you didn't need, you'd give it to whoever did. Claudy is a small community and we all worked together. I felt for the Catholic people of Claudy after the report."

Mary intends writing to British Prime Minister David Cameron to appeal for further investigations into the bombings but she isn't hopeful.

"They said after the Saville Report [into the Bloody Sunday killings in Derry] that there were not going to be any more big investigations. But I think that the government and the church and the hierarchy of the police have to tell us everything they know."

Mark reiterates that all he is asking is that one person will stand up and be counted. "Those responsible are going to be heading towards their 70s, what's the point in putting that man in jail? He's going to be in his own jail soon enough. They have a chance now to make their peace with God at least."

Peace is something that still eludes him in the house at Castlerock his parents moved to after selling up in Claudy. He is reminded of the bone-shattering impact of the bombs by pottery saved from the rubble by his mum, now super-glued back together.

In the past few years, Mark sought the counselling that he didn't receive as a young boy. He has two daughters now, Rebecca and Samantha Kathryn, his eldest. He feels the counselling has brought him closer to them. "I would find it very hard to say to someone that 'I love you'," he says, "I always put a bit of distance."

"That apparently is due to a lack of getting proper counselling at the time of the bombing because I lost so much that I cared about."

The girls are 13 and 11, somewhere around the age Mark was when his family was ripped apart. "My oldest girl is named after Kathryn and she's constantly asking what happened. 'But why Daddy, why did they kill Kathryn?'" He has no answers for her.
FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/my-mother-blamed-herself-for-my-sisters-murder-till-the-day-she-died-2315146.html

Would you buy sperm from these men?

As the world's first 'test-tube baby' celebrates her 32nd birthday, Susan Daly looks at IVF in the 21st Century

Saturday August 07 2010

Few postal workers have their birthday marked by the media every year. Louise Brown, the world's first so-called 'test-tube baby', is an exception. Now the mother of a two-year-old boy in Brighton, England, she celebrated her 32nd birthday last Sunday, a fact noted in several newspapers.

Brown lives an ordinary life -- an achievement in the circumstances -- but her birth is still a source of fascination because it hailed a new era in human reproduction. Unbelievable as it seems, when around 600 babies are conceived each year in Ireland through IVF, at the time it provoked some criticism for 'interfering' with nature.

The ethical questions surrounding assisted baby-making have not disappeared, in particular around the use of anonymous egg or sperm donations and the rights of the child to know their biological parents. (Louise Brown was conceived from material taken from her parents, John and Lesley.)

The latest concerns are over unregulated 'fertility matchmaking' websites that put members in touch with sperm donors. Fertility experts worry that they are exploiting vulnerable would-be parents and putting their health, and the health of babies conceived through unscreened sperm, at risk.

Many of these types of sites encourage 'recipients' and 'donors' to register details which can then be browsed by other users. Membership costs around £10 a month to £300 for an "introduction" between a recipient and donor.

The donor indicates on their profile if they want to remain anonymous, have contact with the child after it reaches 18 or even have a co-parenting role. Most users whose profiles Weekend Review scanned wanted to be anonymous donors.

"I would be very nervous of these sites," says Helen Brown, chairperson of the National Infertility Support and Information Group (NISIG). "They are preying on the vulnerable, probably on single women or single-sex couples, but also on the fact that to get donor sperm and IUI (artificial insemination) in a clinic costs between €600-€800 a time.

"People might think these websites are a bargain, but for that higher price in a clinic, they procure the sperm, wash it, check it, ultrasound the woman to make sure she's ovulating and so on."

Dr David Walsh is director of Ireland's largest private fertility clinic, Sims Fertility, and he too is concerned by the health risks.

"The sites are acting as brokers and of course it's money-making. But the real problem here is that it is unscreened sperm," says Dr Walsh.

"If I donated sperm to a licenced establishment, they won't release that sperm until nine months later when it has been quarantined for diseases that incubate over a number of months."

The 2005 Irish Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction recommended that only frozen donor sperm be used in fertility treatment.

Some site owners claim to have set up their businesses out of altruistic motives. But clearly the logistics of procuring "fresh" sperm from a UK-based website should be a hurdle for Irish women but it turns out that some are not deterred.

"I'm sure there are Irish people on these sites," says Dr David Walsh. "And it's probably a cost issue because most clinics would treat single women now, for example. We have seen this before, a few years ago, where it seemed essentially that sperm was being delivered in the equivalent of a pizza box on the back of a motorbike."

Solicitor Marion Campbell, a leading specialist in family law, warns that these sites are "unlegislated for and unregulated" in Irish law.

'Any contract the two sides makes between each other about 'no contact' or co-parenting on these websites doesn't stand up in law. Where are the rights of the child to know who the father is in all this?

"I know people can be desperate to have a baby and they will do anything to achieve that, and it leaves them very open and vulnerable."

Home invaders

The new Criminal Bill allowing householders to use force to defend themselves and their property seems in many ways to unnecessary in as much as the current law already allows that option IF the householder has no way to retreat from the threat of violence.
I thought it would be interesting to ask people how they reacted when confronted by an intruder in their home. As the trauma psychologist I interviewed in the piece confirms, most of us are frozen to the spot, but it is very difficult to predict how you would behave in such a situation.

From last Saturday's news Review section in the Irish Indepedent:

Waking up to find a strange man standing at the end of the bed is a hellish scenario. It happened to mum-of-one Liz McGonigal -- and, six years on, she still remembers it in distressing detail.

Liz, a PR consultant, was sleeping in the spare room, having just returned home from a stint in hospital. She woke from a fitful sleep at around 5am to see the shape of a man standing at the bedroom door, a few feet from the bed where she lay. She wondered for a moment if it was her husband, Martin, coming to check on her.

"But I knew in the back of my head that it wasn't," she says. "I wasn't entirely with it but it didn't feel right. The person didn't move, they were completely motionless."

Luckily for Liz, she dozed off again, only realising the Dublin city-centre apartment had been burgled when she and her husband rose that morning. Valuable items such as her engagement ring and camera were gone but more shocking was what had been left behind: A kitchen knife had been placed on the coffee table.

"Would he have used it if he had been challenged?" Liz wonders now. "He scaled three floors to get to our apartment -- he shinned up the drainpipe.

"When the police checked for prints, they found his full handprint on the right-hand top of the bedroom door. I found that incredibly chilling."

The fears that we entertain about what would happen if someone threatened us in our homes -- and what we might do about it -- have again come to the fore with the publication of a new Criminal Justice Bill. The bill makes new provision for homeowners to use "reasonable force" to defend themselves against intruders.

But for Liz, the real damage was in the aftermath of that nightmarish experience. "I wasn't hurt but for a long time afterwards I couldn't sleep properly if my husband was away from home for the night," she says.

Maeve Ryan, co-ordinator of the National Crime Victims Helpline, says that the fallout from such "minor" incidents can actually be more difficult to deal with than the crime itself.

"The most common feeling we hear about from people who call our helpline is of vulnerability," she says. "Home is the place you are meant to feel safe and that has been violated, so people can spend a long time afterwards lying awake at night, every little noise magnified."

Even though Liz and her husband moved from the apartment, the anxiety was harder to escape. "You just don't feel safe," she says.

"Here's something that might sound silly: for a time I wouldn't put on the house alarm when I was at home alone because I was terrified what would happen if it ever went off."

A frightening experience at the hands of an intruder some years back still inspires journalist Myles McWeeney to religiously secure all his doors and windows before he goes to bed at night. Again, it was that most terrifying of scenarios -- waking up to a shadowy presence in the bedroom -- that played out in his south Dublin home.

"I had heard a noise and thought it was my wife having a bad dream," recalls Myles.

"When I turned to her, I realised she was still asleep. It was very dark but I could tell there was someone at the end of the bed."

His reaction to the intruder was instantaneous and, as Myles admits, a pure gut response. He yelled and and the would-be burglar took flight.

"He turned tail, luckily," says Myles. "I followed him out. I wasn't even thinking. You're in your bedroom, there's nowhere else to go. It's as if you're at the back of a cage."

The intruder had broken in through a tiny window in the utility room, so narrow that he had apparently stripped down to his T-shirt to wriggle through, leaving a jacket and shirt behind.

Most frightening still was what could have happened. "He had left two syringes filled with blood around the house, presumably intending to use them as a weapon," says Myles. "I am so aware now of how vulnerable we can be in our own home."

Myles and Liz are not on their own. Last year's eircom Phonewatch burglary report found that home invasion is the security issue of most concern to Irish people (46pc cited it as their greatest fear). Perhaps the concern is justified. Eight out of 10 robberies took place in 2009 while people were at home -- suggesting, says the report, "that burglars are not deterred by home occupancy when selecting their target".

Consultant psychologist Owen Connolly specialises in the treatment of traumatic stress at his clinic in Stillorgan, Dublin. The trauma a person can suffer as a result of having their home invaded is similar to that suffered by someone involved in a car crash or even attacked on the street.

"It is the interpretation the brain makes of the event," he says. "The literal reaction the brain can have is 'I'm going to die'. The body prepares itself for the worst eventuality. The heart and lungs get a rush of blood when the central nervous system kicks in and the blood supply to the stomach can be restricted.

"What engages is that 'fight or flight' instinct."

This adrenaline-filled reaction is not always logical but in essence the nervous system overrules the head. Oliver*, a businessman from Co Roscommon, explains his reaction to the attempted robbery of his car in this context.

"I woke up when I heard the car start up outside at five in the morning," he says. "I don't remember how I got there but the next thing I was chasing them down the street in the nude. They stopped the car, I opened the door and grabbed the keys from the ignition."

The would-be thief threatened to stab Oliver with a screwdriver but Oliver punched him and he ran away. "I later found his glasses, which I'd knocked off. I must have been half-asleep at the time and hadn't the time to think. Maybe if I had, I wouldn't have done that."

It's not just men who can be overwhelmed by the instinct to fight back. When Margaret* was a student nurse working nights, she would often find herself alone during the daytime in her shared rented flat.

One afternoon, as she stood at the kitchen table cutting a sandwich, a man started to squeeze through the open kitchen window.

"I don't know who got the bigger fright," she says. "He didn't expect me to be standing there and of course I had the knife in my hand. I started yelling that I would 'effing kill' him and he ran off. It wasn't bravery. I couldn't stop shaking for the rest of the day."

The most common reaction to such a threat, says Connolly, is to freeze.

"The brain tells them, 'If I stay quiet and say nothing, I will survive this'," he says.

"I was dealing with a client who was held hostage for five hours and he went into completely calm mode. That probably saved his bacon. But as soon as his attacker was arrested, he fell apart.

"That person was recently released from prison and the poor man was brought back to the way he felt the first day he was attacked. We talk about putting someone away for a few years for a crime, but the person who was attacked is left with a lifelong sentence of fear that can live on."

Not all people are traumatised by these experiences, thankfully. "But those who are need to know that their reaction is a valid one, and that they should seek counselling to help," says Connolly.

Maeve Ryan says that her volunteer's experience is that many people who call their helpline feel better just for having spoken about how they have been affected by what might be considered a "petty" crime.

"We send out a leaflet to them that reassures them that the stress, the vulnerability and inability to relax in their home are normal effects and they can recover," she says. "They just have to know that they are not going mad."

*Names have been changed on request

The National Crime Victims' Helpline offers confidential support to victims of crime in Ireland. Ring 1850 211 407, email info@crimevictimshelpline.ie or send a text to 085 1337711 and a volunteer will ring you back as soon as possible. A comprehensive list of regional support service for victims of crime is listed on www.csvc.ie

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/home-garden/the-night-i-woke-up-to-find-a-burglar-in-my-bedroom-2270900.html

Book review: Without Him by Fiona O'Brien

Published in Irish Independent Review, Saturday, July 10, 2010

The decadent antics of Dublin socialites have been a rich seam of inspiration for author Fiona O'Brien this past eight years.

A former advertising executive who was born, bred and is still living in the D4 area, she has written entertainingly and with authority on multi-millionaire businessmen, their brittle, stick-thin wives and champagne lifestyle.

Although her fifth novel again mines this familiar territory, the premise of Without Him is more intriguing for the D4 set's recent fall from grace. The Veuve Cliquot has stopped flowing and the high-fliers are now at the epicentre of the economic crash. This is an opportunity for O'Brien, one of the smartest writers of popular fiction around, to get her teeth into deeper, seamier material.

The opening chapters don't disappoint. Shelley is the beautiful wife of charismatic developer Charlie Fitzgibbon. They once had a dream life: three gorgeous children, a suburban mansion, pots of money and social status.

When we meet Shelley, the dream has crumbled. Charlie's business has collapsed, he has fled the country to God knows where and she and the children are forced to move into the modest home of Charlie's estranged mother Vera after their mansion is repossessed. Charlie, the cad, has forged Shelley's co-signature on the house deeds and handed them over to one of his more demanding creditors.

Pity has been in short supply for those whom we have come to see as the architects of the nation's financial woes, but O'Brien makes a strong case for considering the fallout on the families of the central players. (The property big boys in the novel are fictionalised, of course, but O'Brien is clearly influenced by certain high-profile cases.)

A scene in which workmen come to remove the designer kitchen from Shelley's luxury home is powerful and poignant. Shelley's devastation is utterly believable.

It is not all doom and gloom. A touch of escapism arrives in the unlikely form of sultan of bling, Lukaz, a Russian oligarch looking to buy up half of Dublin. His outrageous tastes inject enough fun and fantasy to qualify the book as a rollicking holiday read.

The character of Charlie is less exciting. Absent for most of the story, he is a charismatic enigma when portrayed through the eyes of his mother, his wife and his children. When we get the full truth of the family secrets that have shaped him, he emerges as some sort of victim of circumstance both in business and in his personal life.

O'Brien may have misstepped here. Her readership is paying dearly for the greed of failed fat cats in real life. Will they be happy to swallow a fictional Champagne Charlie who claims to have simply been misunderstood?
- Susan Daly
FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/review-without-him-2253360.html

"This is my son we're talking about"

This will be a court case to watch when it comes up in the Irish High Court in the coming 12 months. A number of Roaccutane-related lawsuits are also pending in the US (where the drug was sold under the name Accutane).
From last Saturday's Review section in the Irish Independent:

By Susan Daly
Liam Grant was a young man with all of life's advantages on his side. The 19 year old was handsome, popular and academic, in his second year of an engineering degree at UCD.

He was equally talented in sport and in music, played in a band and had built a recording studio in the garden of his family's comfortable suburban home in Terenure, Dublin.

He had a firm eye on the future, working his way towards a career as a sound engineer. He was "an outgoing young man", his only concern apparently a mild case of acne on his neck and shoulders. For this, Liam was prescribed Roaccutane, a strong acne medication, by a dermatologist in February 1997.

Thirteen years on, his father, Liam Senior, pinpoints this as the time when his son's character changed dramatically. The young student withdrew from friends and family, spending more time in his bedroom, the curtains drawn because he said light bothered him. He instructed his younger brother to tell friends who called to see him that he wasn't at home.

In June 1997, Liam was found hanging from a tree in the foothills of the Dublin mountains. He left a note expressing his belief that he had few friends and that the turnout for his funeral would prove it. In that respect he was entirely, poignantly, wrong.

Since an inquest jury returned a verdict of death by suicide for Liam, his father has been battling to prove that his son had taken his own life as a direct result of taking Roaccutane -- and that Roche, the pharmaceutical giant that manufactures the drug, knew of the risks and failed to sufficiently warn patients of them.

Roche denies that Roaccutane causes "psychiatric events" but in a victory for father-of-four Mr Grant this week, the European Ombudsman has ordered the European Medicines Agency to collate and hand over to him all adverse reaction reports it has received relating to Roaccutane. The information will be vital when Mr Grant finally squares up to Roche in a High Court case within the coming 12 months.

"It has taken seven years to get to this point," Mr Grant, now 61, told Review this week. In 2004, he sued Roche in the High Court. The company offered to pay him the maximum compensation under law for the death of his son -- about €30,000 -- as well as his costs and special damages. This offer would not, however, include any admission of liability on Roche's part for Liam Junior's death.

"Six years ago, Roche made me an offer plus legal costs and I wouldn't take it. Then their appeal in the Supreme Court (to make him accept their offer) failed and I was allowed to proceed. We have been waiting for this for a long time now so it's really good for us that we will have the case heard in the next year.

"I would say that anyone taking on a pharmaceutical company like this would really want to understand what they have taken on," says Mr Grant, referring to the David vs Goliath nature of his challenge to Roche.

As a forensic accountant with some 40 years' experience, he has some experience of drawn-out legal processes.

Mr Grant says he has never been "intimidated one iota" by the lengthy legal challenge because, he says, "I am used to this kind of work". His accountancy firm has acted as experts in the Mahon Inquiry, formerly the Flood Tribunal.

Yet the personal toll on the Grant family since young Liam's death is immeasurable. Mr Grant has spent over €1m in building a case against Roche, gradually selling off a portfolio of properties he had invested in to fund his retirement. He has funded several independent research studies into the side effects of Roaccutane, including one which was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

The drug, which went under the brand name Accutane in the US, was pulled from the American market last year. Roche says that decision was for purely business reasons, and still strongly denies the medication can cause suicide, but the drug has been cited in scores of personal injury cases there. Roaccutane is still prescribed to acne sufferers in Ireland.

Roche Pharmaceuticals Ireland told Review that while they wouldn't comment on the European Ombudsman's decision or the Grant case in specifics, "the wellbeing of the patients taking our medicines is of primary importance, and we are constantly monitoring the safety of all of our medicines, including Roaccutane (isotretinoin)."

The Roche statement added: "Since 1982, over 15 million patients worldwide have been treated with Roaccutane. Although there have been very rare reports of suicides and suicidal ideation in patients with acne being treated with the medicine, the fact is that severe acne can cause some sufferers to become depressed and can also affect their mood and self-esteem."

Roche also says that a patient information leaflet provided with Roaccutane advises that patients tell their doctor if they "notice any change in mood or behaviour" while taking the drug. However, Mr Grant maintains that this warning was not included by Roche with the drug in Ireland at the time it was prescribed to Liam in 1997.

The battle clearly isn't about money for Liam Grant Senior. He was firmly supported in his ongoing case against Roche by his wife Loyola until she died three years ago, just before the Supreme Court ruling.

"It isn't for the weak-hearted," he says of his continuing battle. "But this is my son we're talking about."
FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/national-news/13-years-after-my-son-died-its-great-to-get-my-day-in-court-2235997.html

Shelf life for lads' mags...

‘Lads, gags and shags’ mags might be falling in sales but, SUSAN DALY asks, have readers’ tastes really changed – or are they just gone elsewhere?

WHAT men want is what marketers the world over want to know. Nearly 300 years ago, the first men’s magazine appeared to have it all figured out.

The Gentleman’s Magazine was launched in 1731 to great success. It titillated subscribers with a heady mix of social gossip and gruesome details of recent executions. It printed tips from readers on how to keep all one’s own teeth and hair into advanced age (which, granted, was probably no more than 55 in the 18th century).

Gawping at celebs, body-consciousness and a fascination with gore – it doesn’t sound a million miles removed from the lad-mag culture of today.
Nonetheless an American media mogul is claiming that the lads’ mag as we know it is dead. Michael Rideout (what fun mags like Nuts or Zoo would have with that name) is launching a new publication and website targeting men in the 25-34 age bracket. He has given the brand the aspirational name of MadePossible and describes it as the “anti-Maxim”, referring to one of the former market leaders in the ‘girls, gadgets and grog’ magazine sector.

“At around 25, guys start making grown-up choices for the first time that will largely shape their future,” he says. Young men want substance, not sex in their bathroom reading material, he argues.

If Rideout is right, then the end must be nigh for a huge publishing phenomenon: the lads’ mag. Top-shelf men’s material has been around since the advent of lurid Victorian ‘penny dreadfuls’ – cheap pulp fiction aimed at young men – right through the creation of Playboy and its more hardcore successors Penthouse and Hustler. But what the 1990s brought was a boom in men’s magazines that were considered acceptable to display at eye-level, just about.

In 1994, Loaded fired the first volley in a revolution of mainstream men’s mags. Esquire and GQ existed at the time as glossy men’s ‘lifestyle’ publications but were concerned with literary essays and advising readers on the importance of wearing an expensive watch.

By contrast, Loaded announced that it would be the magazine “for men who should know better”. Its 20-something creator James Brown said they spoke to “the millions of real blokes who love football and want to pull women… I’m very proud to say we’ve lowered the tone.”

Quick to lower it further – and noticing the 250,000 copies sold by Loaded in a matter of 18 months – titles like FHM and Maxim appeared on the scene. FHM in particular captured the …er… imagination of hormonal young readers with its High-Street Honeys competition, which celebrated “real-life hotties” by inviting them to pose for the mag in bikinis. Female C-list celebs began to see the obligatory photoshoot for a lads’ mag as a viable career move (see panel).

James Brown has claimed that he wasn’t trying to do anything that hadn’t already been deemed a success in women’s magazines. To persuade his publishers that Loaded wouldn’t be taken off the shelves for being too lewd, he showed them headlines and articles about sex taken from women’s magazines. “At the centre I placed an article giving details on ‘How To Give A Blow Job’ from Cosmo,” he said.

The men’s magazine sector had never seen anything like the bump in circulation figures in the following five years. FHM, which took over as market leader, sold almost a million copies a month between the UK and Ireland by 1998. It fit with the laddish culture of Men Behaving Badly on TV and Oasis in the charts, supposedly obsessed with beer, birds and tongue-in-cheek humour. If you didn’t see the fig leaf of irony – as some commentators and sociologists didn’t – the implication was that you weren’t getting it.

Here, where Playboy was only available in a brown envelope from cousin Mikey in America until 1993, the new additions to the newsagents looked startling next to copies of Ireland’s Own and the RTE Guide.

The sales figures stayed high until the early Noughties – or Naughties, as the mags would probably have called them – but were massively hit by the downward evolution of even less sexually subtle weekly titles like Zoo and Nuts.

With their competitions to “win your girlfriend a boob job”, gross-out pics of freak accidents and what the industry would call a high nipple count, there is no pretence that they are being read for their articles. There have been calls to have the mags bagged, tagged and reassigned to the top shelf. A recent ‘publishing error’ in Zoo magazine caused huge controversy when actor Danny Dyer’s celebrity column advised a broken-hearted reader to cut his ex-girlfriend’s face.

They are under siege on the sales front too have seen a drastic fall in circulation. Zoo and Nuts were down over 20 per cent off their year-on-year sales in the last half of 2009.

Does this mean that the boys have finally grown up? It would be a pretty abrupt end to the history of soft porn and erotica. Cave art from over 12,000 years ago found in Creswell Crag, England only a few years ago includes huge paintings of female genitalia. When Victorian archaeologists cracked open the ruins of Pompeii, they were so mortified by the many artefacts inscribed with graphic depictions of sex acts that felt the need to hide them away in a secret museum in Naples for over 150 years.

A cursory glance at the reading habits of the Irish male might conclude that they are a refined bunch compared to the inhabitants of ancient Rome. Homegrown magazines dedicated to the Irish male have never managed to take off here, for example.

But on closer look, the titles that tried their hand and ultimately failed, Patrick and Himself, were pretty tame. The first media brand to target the Irish male in quite some time is the new website Joe.ie. It appears again to be a relatively restrained mix of sports, style, entertainment news, motors and money. (Although it does feature a section titled ‘Joe’s Lovely Ladies’, currently illustrated by a pic of everyone’s favourite FAS model Georgia Salpa.)

It is interesting to note, however, that the section of Joe.ie with most hits in the first few months of the site’s existence is not the GAA column by Cork icon Sean Og O hAilpin nor the healthy eating column by chef Kevin Dundon. It is the sex and relationship agony aunt column by glamour model Claire Tully. Topics to tickle Tully’s fancy include bikinis (to wear or not to wear), cross-dressing and the rather less inconsequential matter of false rape allegations.

Sexual obsession might be moved out of the eyeline of the impressionable from time to time like those kinky Pompeiian artefacts but in those cases it just goes underground for a while. More likely, lad-culture magazine buyers have simply gone online. When Australian lads’ mag Ralph announced the current issue will be its last ever, due to poor sales, its publisher Phil Scott said it was because the tastes of young male readers had changed. “The growth of online is a factor but if history is any guide, it is not the key issue,” he claimed.

Yet most lads’ mags seem to recognise the siren call of the online portal into ever more raunchy content – they have all launched their own websites with ‘extra value’ material. (The Nuts website is currently home to 100 Real Girls in Bed, videos of crazy car stunts and a competition called Assess My Breasts).

On top of that, those with more extreme tastes know they can easily find other sites where the kind of material available is not subject to consumer watchdogs. It makes the breasts and booze of lads’ mags look almost quaint.

SOFT PORN – OR CAREER MOVE? Five lads’ mags favourite cover girls (Or in ladspeak: Top five birds)
GAIL PORTER: The children’s TV presenter said she had no idea FHM were going to project a naked image of her photoshoot with them on the London Houses of Parliament – but it gave the mag record-breaking sales in July 1999, and made Porter a household name.
ABI TITMUSS: The former nurse emerged from the shadow of being ex-girlfriend of disgraced telly personality John Leslie by posing for 38 covers of lads’ magazines in 2004 and 2005, and becoming a reality TV regular off the back of it. She has since become an actress but did a photoshoot for Nuts last year.
JENNIFER ELLISON: The baby-faced Brookside actress put what in lads’ mag parlance would be her blonde, busty looks to work as a regular pin-up. Her first such shoot was for FHM at the age of 16 under the headline ‘Jailbait’. She has since said that posing for lads’ mags has hurt her acting career in the UK, saying “UK casting agencies can be a bit sniffy” about glamour models.
CHANELLE HAYES: The female contestants on this year’s final series of Channel 4’s Big Brother who stripped off within hours of entering the house will no doubt be contemplating a lucrative, if possible short, stint doing the same for lads’ mags on their eviction.
It has been a tradition of BB that each cast has at least one camera-loving exhibitionist – and a tradition of the mags to feature them on the cover immediately after. Chanelle Hayes claim to fame in 2007’s Big Brother was a striking resemblance to Victoria Beckham. Since then, she has become one of the most regular BB contestants to pose for lads’ mags and co-presented Nuts TV in 2008.
ENDS

Still in Vogue

Fabulous at 40 - how does Naomi do it?
It's the veteran supermodel's birthday today and she looks stunning. Susan Daly susses out her secrets and sees how her contemporaries are doing.
Saturday May 22 2010

Turning 40 is a milestone by anyone's measure. Turning 40 when you're one of the world's most scrutinised models is monumental. Naomi Campbell, who reaches the big 4-0 today, is a rare exception in an industry ruled by youth and beauty.

So remarkable is her career longevity that Oprah Winfrey dedicated an hour-long special to Campbell earlier this month. It was pitched as the world's most powerful black woman getting to the core of the world's most beautiful black woman. The conversation ranged from why she's such an angry person -- a fear of abandonment apparently -- to her friendship with Nelson Mandela.

In reality, Winfrey's viewers probably couldn't care less about Campbell's core. The biggest question as Campbell gets into her fifth decade is purely superficial: How the hell does she still look so good?

There was a riveting segment in the Winfrey special in which Campbell makes a video diary of her new home town of Moscow where she lives with billionaire boyfriend Vladislav Doronin. In her whistlestop tour of the city, she points out a traditional spot for newlyweds to have their photographs taken and deigns to step into a few group shots.

The rigidly fixed smiles of the unfortunate brides say it all. Even at 40, Naomi Campbell is the last person any woman wants to be snapped standing beside on her big day.

Good genes clearly have a lot to answer for: Campbell has always had cheekbones you could hang a Philip Treacy hat on. Yet surely it takes more than a decent bone structure to hold back the ravages of a heady lifestyle.

She has admitted to having worked hard and played harder at the height of her 1990s fame. She was a regular fixture on the party scene as on the catwalk, stepping out with high-profile boyfriends like Robert de Niro, Mike Tyson and ex-fiance Adam Clayton of U2. When her friend, designer Gianni Versace, was shot dead in 1997 she slid into a pattern of drug use that came to a head when she collapsed at a photo shoot in 1999.

"I felt like I couldn't keep up with the grief, so I just started replacing it with drugs," she said. Two months ago, she admitted: "I thought I'd never actually make this birthday."

Little trace of this hard living is visible on Campbell's unlined face and lithe, toned limbs. She was recently papped on her boyfriend's yacht, wearing a tiny bikini and showing off a body most 20-year-olds would envy.

Eleven years ago she told Playboy magazine the secret to her banging bod: "I never diet. I smoke. I drink now and then. I never work out." If the smoking/drinking/no diet or exercise regime was a real winner, wouldn't we all be supermodels?

"Naomi Campbell is pretty unique," concedes 1st Options model agency boss Trish Fallon. "My sister Jules (and business partner) once met Naomi and her mum, and her mother is also absolutely stunning. But if you look at Naomi's body -- it's like an Olympic athlete's. She is definitely following a regime to keep herself in tip-top condition."

Campbell may have burned the candle at both ends from time to time but, says Fallon, she is a real contrast to her contemporary, 36-year-old Kate Moss. "Let's be honest, Kate Moss isn't looking great," says Fallon. "I love her but look at her skin, her teeth, her eyes -- her lifestyle has really started to catch up with her."

Campbell insists that she's never invited the helping hand of a plastic surgeon. Dr Katherine Mulrooney, dermatologist and cosmetic doctor, has a finely tuned antenna for telltale signs of medical intervention. "The most I could say that Naomi would have had might be the slightest amount of Botox," she says.

"Science has come on so much that everything from what you eat to what you put on your skin can have a huge impact over a couple of years. I'm sure she takes anti-oxidants in her food and applies them topically because she has an amazing glow and vitality to her skin."

The biggest factor in her youthful appearance, however, was with Naomi in the womb. "Her skin colour is Fitzpatrick Type 5 (a classification of skin's reaction to UV light). You and I, being pale-skinned and prone to burning, have type 1. The sun is the most ageing environmental factor to the skin and her skin has an inherent sun block. Black skin is also a lot more resilient to other environmental factors. It is slightly thicker than most and can take more wear and tear."

Or, to quote Winfrey and Campbell herself, "Black don't crack."

Those amazing cheekbones are also key, as they act as a type of scaffolding for the face. "Naomi has what we call the 'triangle of youth' where the broadest part of the face is around the eyes and the smallest point is at the chin," says Mulrooney. "If you are blessed with good cheekbones, they are literally like a vector from which the skin will hang, giving it a taut, voluminous look."

Despite being a genetic lottery winner, Campbell has moved to distance herself from her old comments in Playboy about not having to work for her body. "Now I've stopped the parties, stopped trying to burn the candle at both ends," she said.

The Oprah audience was treated to the sight of Naomi working out in her gym. (Surprisingly, it didn't involve vigorous mobile-throwing upper-arm moves.) She uses Pilates-based strength exercises known as gyrotonics. "As we all get older, everything changes and moves, and there are natural ways to exercise," she said. "I think it's important, and I think it's something that can help keep things in place."

Neither is she pigging out on fast food after her daily workouts. She no longer eats gluten and gave up eating meat a year-and-a-half ago. Boyfriend Doronin has also had an influence. "If there is bread on the table, he's like: 'Don't eat bread,'" she told Oprah.

Living in the wacky world of high-fashion, however, has left Campbell with some bogus notions about what's good for her. She also told Oprah that she goes on the infamous Master Cleanse diet three times a year. This is the crash dieting method favoured by the likes of Beyonce and Gwyneth Paltrow. The mainstay of the diet is a concoction made from maple syrup, water, lemon juice and cayenne pepper. "It was not what you would characterise as pretty or easy," Paltrow has said, "It did work, however."

Well, yes, it would do. As the dieter consumes less than 600 calories a day, they are essentially starving themselves. Some celebs use the Master Cleanse for up to 10 days at a time -- Campbell said she once did it for 18 days in a row.

She doesn't have to be so hard on herself. Mulrooney adds: "I'm sure Naomi does all she can to keep age at bay but, really, she was just born lucky."

THE OTHERS...

CLAUDIA SCHIFFER
Schiffer will be 40 next year but is still fit enough to pose nude -- and heavily pregnant -- for the cover of the current German Vogue.
Perhaps it's the slight overbite that helps her retain the slightly childlike air but Schiffer looks like she is still hovering around her early 30s.
Her client list, however, has moved from haute couture to more commercially friendly high street stores like Mango and Accessorise in recent years.

VERONICA MOORE (right)
This Irish model was a favourite muse of Vivienne Westwood in the 1990s and was a huge star in the high-fashion world of Japan for years. Even though she is now 38, her youthful look had her fronting the cutting-edge graduate show from the Limerick College of Art and Design last year.

KATE MOSS
Kate Moss has four years to go before she reaches the big 4-0 but she has already suffered her share of unflattering paparazzi shots. Her rock-chic lifestyle of sex, drugs and late nights has not been without its toll.
"She's also an inveterate smoker," says Dr Katherine Mulrooney, "and it really is the worst thing you can do to your skin after sun damage." Moss was the third-highest paid model in the world last year, raking in €7m -- a chunk of this came from her designer range in TopShop.

HELENA CHRISTENSEN
The former Miss Denmark passed the 40 mark in December 2008 with the high cheekbones inherited from her Peruvian mother still very much intact.
Christensen spent her 30s mostly behind the camera. Now though she is the face -- and, more importantly, bottom -- of a Reebok campaign in which she appears entirely perfect and entirely naked, save for a pair of trainers.

LINDA EVANGELISTA
Canadian beauty Linda uttered the immortal words: "We don't wake up for less than $10,000 a day." At 45, she's proving somewhat immortal herself.
Three years ago she was still a cover girl for Vogue and two years ago was the face for Prada. At the moment she is a L'Oreal ambassador -- although specifically for their anti-age range.

CHRISTY TURLINGTON
Turlington's face is so perfectly symmetrical that the New York City Metropolitan Museum of Art made a mould of it to represent the ideal of beauty. At 41, she remains pretty much flawless; the result, it seems, of a dedication to yoga and hatred of smoking(see her website smokingisugly.com).

CINDY CRAWFORD
Crawford is the eldest of the original supermodels, but if it's any consolation to her, she is May cover girl for Fashion magazine under the headline: Still Sizzling at 44.
Harper's Bazaar announced in March, 'The Sexiest Super is Back', quoting designer Christopher Kane: "I have fond memories of my sisters working out in our living room to her fitness videos. We still have the first one, and her body hasn't changed! Is she a machine?"

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/celebrity-news-gossip/fabulous-at-40-how-does-naomi-do-it-2190387.html
...AND HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/celebrity-news-gossip/still-in-vogue-supermodels-then-and-now-2190532.html

Acting the rich bitch

Even the poshest shops and most exclusive brands are quietly cutting their prices, says Susan Daly

In September last year, an extraordinary party hit the headlines. Around 300 employees of the London branch of Lehman Brothers gathered in a bar near their offices. The bank whose $600bn (€460bn) collapse triggered the global financial crisis then treated its remaining staff to an evening of expensive wine and pink champagne -- a toast of sorts on the anniversary of the crash.

Few of us non-bankers are willing to be seen swilling champagne in public but there are signs that the demand for luxury products is warming up. LVMH, the world's largest luxury goods firm, recorded a 13pc jump in sales for the first quarter of 2010. Asia is a big market now for the status symbols LVMH purveys -- Louis Vuitton handbags, Tag-Heuer watches, Moet et Chandon, Krug and Don Perignon champagne -- but the firm reported that their European sales are also on the up.

"While I wouldn't say we are out of the woods, there is a lot more confidence around," says Stephen Sealey, managing director of high-end store Brown Thomas. "The accessories business is quite strong."

Some consumer watchers say we are indulging a pent-up desire for nice things. We've paid down some of our personal debt and we're bored of deprivation.

Sealey says that his well-heeled customers have snapped up premium-price items like Victoria Beckham's clothing range without hesitation (and you won't get change from €1,000 for an entry-level dress in that collection), or to-die-for wrist candy like the Mulberry Alexa, named for celebrity clothes horse du jour, Alexa Chung.

But while Sealey says that Brown Thomas "will never go down the route of cut-price and lower-end lines", there is evidence that looking and living like a millionaire has never been more accessible for the average Joe and Josephine. Brands and service providers have been forced to find ways of drawing us back in after 18 months of starving for custom.

"I would say that 90pc of retailers are committed to special offers and extra value packages," says Alan Gilligan of onoffer.ie, which has an online forum for consumers to tip each other off to bargain discoveries.

Brian Sargent, director of luxury holiday company Tropical Sky, says it is on track to double business this year over 2009 because punters are finding such value at the luxury end of the market. "We're talking a week in the Maldives at a four-star hotel, watersports, all-inclusives at €1,700 -- that kind of package would have been €2,800 last year," he says.

Fortune -- or saving one -- favours the bold, says Sargent.

"Many customers will now come in and say, 'What are you going to do for me for that price?' In the vast majority of cases now, you can negotiate another extra in there, maybe upgrade their hired car and so on. This year is a great one for travellers because the airlines have softened their prices and hotels are even more aggressively discounting."

Many areas of the luxury goods and services industry prefer the euphemism of "extra value" -- discounts are so crass, darling. So luxury hotels will offer extra nights of accommodation free, or include spa treatments in the overall price.

But there is no denying that in some cases, prices have simply been chopped.

Gilligan mentions one "very nice restaurant" in Dublin was recently offering a lunch deal that invited customers to toss a coin: heads, you pay; tails, lunch is free.

Golf clubs, too, the source of much snobbery and bragging rights in the Celtic Tiger years, are lobbing huge lumps off their prices. To take an extreme example, joining the exclusive Druids Glen club in Co Wicklow a few years ago would have involved finding a spare €50,000 for the joining fee. That fee has now been scrapped entirely and the annual membership costs €4,000.

An acquaintance tells me that he recently joined his local club for €5,000. His friend, who joined it in 2007, is raging because he paid €14,000 for his membership at the time. He feels like a Celtic cub who was sold a pup.

Were my acquaintance to toast his one-up-manship, he might plump for one of the many fine champagnes currently on special offer. Around Valentine's Day, a time when traditionally demand for bottles of bubbly kept prices at a premium, Bollinger was selling its Special Cuvee for a bargain €50 in O'Brien's off-licences. Bolly, one notes, is the only brand of bubbles that James Bond and Queen Victoria would allow tickle their tongue.

Pascal Rossignol, owner of Le Caveau speciality wine shop in Kilkenny city, says: "There have been some big discounts from the grands marques (the high-end champagne houses), fairly good discounts that we have been able to pass on to the customers."

We'll say cheers to that, but if you're going to look the Ab Fab part, you'll need to dress it too.

Kildare Village designer outlet opened in 2006, at the height of the spending frenzy here, but has managed to prove recession-resistant because contractually, everything has to be at least 33pc cheaper than recommended retail prices.

On a weekday morning, the newly opened Juicy Couture store there is packed with young, poker-haired women rifling through the plush velvet sportswear made famous on the pert backsides of stars like Eva Longoria, Paris Hilton, Jennifer Lopez and Madonna. This is not end-of-line, factory rejects stuff: Review kits itself out in a pair of on-trend, straight-leg DKNY dark denims for €69 and toys with a pair of classic Tom Ford aviators (one-third off the normal €300 asking price), as sported by the likes of Brad Pitt and Jessica Simpson.

The assistant in the sunglasses shop says that the Tom Ford line is proving particularly popular because they are understated and don't scream bling.

"People like their designer hit but they don't want to be seen flashing big logos any more. It looks fake," he confides.

And therein lies the key to tapping into the millionaire lifestyle: by all means look for the bargain but never, ever wear your labels on your sleeve.

TEN DEALS TO MAKE YOU FEEL LIKE A MILLIONAIRE
LIVING THE DREAM: The fact that it’s a buyer’s market out there is nowhere more obvious true than in property. Belmayne, a housing development near Donaghmede in north Dublin, tried to sell itself as Millionaire’s Row in 2007 when it jetted in football star Jamie Redknapp and his wife Louise to promote their apartments and houses.
A new developer has since taken over the latest phase of Belmayne and representatives Hooke and MacDonald tell Review that “we’re not selling a dream – everything is on the ground and looks a million dollars”. Nonetheless, a two-bed apartment in Belmayne is now up for grabs for e175,000 (a one-bed cost e275,000 in 2007) and a three-bed house now costs e220,000 (it was e365,000 in 2007).
MICHELIN MUNCHING: Even Michelin-starred restaurants are having to tempt diners. Bon Appetit in Malahide is one such spot and is offering three courses and a bottle of wine for two people for e75.
If it’s the drama of fine dining that appeals, you could always head to Conrad Gallagher (he of Peacock Alley infamy) in his new Salon des Saveurs restaurant on Aungier Street where set menus start at e24.
CHEERS! Moet et Chandon’s most recent glossy campaign had movie star Scarlett Johannson balancing a champagne glass between her perfectly manicured toes. Try re-creating her pose with a bottle of the brand’s bubbly for e38 from lecaveau.ie. “The same bottle of Moet was closer to e50 in mid-2008,” says wine importer Pascal Rossignol.
JEAN GENIES: A strange phenomenon of the Noughties was designers charging over e300 for the humble pair of jeans. Now, Rock & Republic denim, Victoria Beckham’s old favourite, has filed for bankruptcy. Paper Denim & Cloth brand, once worn by everyone from Cameron Diaz to the Olsen Twins, is relaunching as a reduced-rate line (around e80).
At the Kildare Village outlet of 7 For All Mankind, the ‘premium-denim’ brand favoured by Angelina Jolie, Reese Witherspoon and Ben Affleck, you can buy 3 pairs for the price of 2 (handy if you team up with two friends) and one e229 line is marked down to e69.
READY FOR YOUR CLOSE-UP? The modern equivalent of the oil painting over the mantlepiece is the photostudio session. If airbrushing is good enough for celebrity cover girls like Kate Winslet on GQ and Demi Moore on W magazine… The Photography Studio in Harold’s Cross, Dublin is offering a professional photo session for e220 (this service would have cost upwards of e400 three years ago according to onoffer.ie)
SLEEP ON IT: You might not be able to afford your own personal pillow-plumper, but Irish five-star hotel breaks are increasingly good value. The 5-star Hayfield Manor in Cork has in the past hosted the King of Jordan, the King of Malaysia, Mary Robinson and Mary McAlees, Pierce Brosnan, Diana Ross and Lionel Ritchie. Now they’ll put you up for two nights B&B, plus one 4-course dinner and a e50 voucher for spa treatments costs e228 per person. The same package was e350 in 2008.
ART ATTACK: When the financial crisis hit in late 2008, the market for expensive art sagged. While a Picasso might still be out of range for most of us, Dolan’s art auctions, the biggest provincial sales house, is now conducting their auctions without reserve prices. “I figure art should be accessible to a broader spectrum of the population,” says Dr Niall Dolan, “You should be able to come in with e300-e500 and come away with an interesting painting.” Dolan’s next auction is at the Marriott Hotel, Galway on Sunday, May 16.
GREENS WITH ENVY: Is there anything as civilized as a round with the boys, followed by steak and a fine Bordeaux in the club house? Golf club membership has dropped in price sharply at all levels. Luttrellstown Castle for example sported a mid-range annual fee of e7,000 in 2007, but is now asking for only e2,500 a year and is currently running a special rate of e1,500 for membership through the peak playing months of April to September.
AFRICAN QUEEN: Forget the Seychelles. Kenya, with its mix of beach and safari activities, is particularly popular with the likes of Bill Gates, Naomi Campbell and Bono. Lest we forget, it was in a villa in the south coast of Mombasa, Kenya, where Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie first ignited their passion.
A combination of lower air fares and ‘added value’ accommodation deals have knocked down prices in the last year. “It’s not that it’s inexpensive exactly,” says Brian Sargent of tropicalsky.ie “but Kenya and Zanzibar are coming in at e1,000 less per person, to about e3,000 all in.”
JOIN THE CLUB: There was whining from some members of Residence private members’ club on St Stephen’s Green, Dublin last year when it was suggested that the ailing business might be offering cut-price membership deals. It is the case that many of these private members’ clubs have cut fees in a bid to refresh member numbers in the past few years. The thing to ask yourself though before trying to haggle your way past the velvet ropes is: Would I join any club that would have half the Law Library as members?

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/its-never-been-easier-to-live-like-a-millionaire-2172358.html

Grainne and GMTV

The following is not my headline, mind....

"At 36, could Grainne still make it big on British TV?"
By Susan Daly
Saturday May 01 2010

It's a brave person who mispronounces Grainne Seoige's name. From the moment she opened TG4's first news bulletin with her crisp, Connemara enunciation 14 years ago, she has been very clear about it. The name is 'Show-ig-eh'.

The male anchor of GMTV's Newshour showed no such reverence this week. Clearly unarmed with a phonetic guide to the name of the stand-in sports reporter on his morning TV couch, presenter John Stapleton breezily introduced 'Granya Soudja'.

Grainne didn't bat an eyelid or attempt a correction. This she has realised: we're not in Knocknacarra any more, Toto. These folks don't care who is topping the gorgeous Gaeilgeoir polls.

Why should they? GMTV (Good Morning Television), the breakfast TV channel owned by ITV, beams out three-and-a-half hours of programming every morning to around 13 million viewers each week, second only to the BBC's Breakfast Show.

There is good scope for a variety of presenting styles because the programme carries different segments, beginning with the early hard-hitting Newshour, followed by a core segment mixing light and topical issues, and ending with 55 minutes of chat with Lorraine Kelly.

GMTV is an attractive destination for an ambitious presenter -- it is where Belfast broadcaster Eamon Holmes began his long career in chat TV -- but is it a reinvention too far for Grainne Seoige at the age of 36?

Ageism is not alien to the competitive UK television industry. Veteran newsreaders Anna Ford and Selina Scott have been vocal against perceived age discrimination and last year there was public outrage when Strictly Come Dancing judge Arlene Phillips (66) was dumped in favour of singer Alesha Dixon.

These slighted women are considerably older than Grainne Seoige, but as she told an interviewer earlier this year: "Well, I don't like to be judged myself but I live with the fact that I'm in a business that will judge me on how I look."

For now though, her recent presenting gig for GMTV from the Cheltenham races has segued into a temporary slot as the show's sports news reader. This week, it was suggested by an ITV source that Grainne has impressed to the point that she may be offered something more permanent. Her RTE contract is due for renewal this summer, and her son Conall is now in Transition Year in school: logistically, it's not an outrageous suggestion. "In terms of age profile, the GMTV crew are no kindergarten babes," says TV producer Larry Bass.

"It's a show that needs real people who have real-life experience."

Kate Garraway, regular co-host of GMTV, is 43 next week. Lorraine Kelly, who presents a self-titled slot, is 50. The other Irish female presenter who has done some reporting gigs for GMTV in recent times is Lorraine Keane, also in her mid 30s.

It's not all good news though -- Penny Smith (51) has just been given an unceremonial heave-ho in the same shake-up at GMTV that has seen Grainne get her chance on the couch.

"I would 100pc disagree that it is too late for Grainne to be making a move like that," says presentation-skills trainer Emma Ledden. "If she was any younger she wouldn't have the life experience or the credibility for GMTV.

"It's not like she was going for somewhere like MTV. At 32, even I would be too old for them now!"

Ledden worked as a VJ for MTV UK -- at the age of 20 -- when she won a competition for new presenters. She went on to present the BBC's youth show Live and Kicking in 1999 but has since returned to Ireland to run her own communications company.

In contrast to the successful transfer of a string of male Irish personalities to UK screens over the years, from Eamon Andrews and Terry Wogan to Dara O Briain, few Irish women have made a similar impact. Liz Bonnin is forging a smart niche for herself on BBC science programmes. Laura Whitmore -- 25 this week -- presents for MTV. Former model Amanda Byram hosted a number of American reality shows and is now co-hosting the BBC's Total Wipeout game show. The only other Irishwoman who readily springs to mind is journalist Olivia O'Leary, who became the first female presenter of the BBC's current affairs programme Newsnight in 1985.

Ledden feels the disparity is not just for Irish women breaking Britain. "Many of the men who have made it are associated with chat shows, and it reflects the same situation here in Ireland," she says.

The three presenters being tried out for the Saturday Night Show are men; Brendan O'Connor, Craig Doyle and Gerry Ryan.

"It's strange they didn't try out someone like Grainne for that, or Amanda," says Emma. "Are women forever destined to be co-hosts?"

It is in this context that the Seoige name has been bandied about this week. With the news that Adrian Chiles is moving from the BBC to GMTV in a £6m golden handcuffs deal, speculation has been rife that he will need a Christine Bleakley-style presenter (his former One Show co-host, also Irish, also gorgeous) by his side.

Stephen O'Leary of O'Leary Analytics analysed the media coverage of Grainne Seoige since January for the Weekend Review. He found that from Monday to Wednesday of this week, "Grainne has generated more column inches this week than any other week in 2010." This period includes much of her time as host of RTE ratings-winner, The All-Ireland Talent Show. A large part of the excitement over Grainne's modest stint on GMTV has been inflated by the hype over Chiles.

Larry Bass, the man behind ratings hits like The Apprentice and You're A Star, feels that, nonetheless, the mixture of news and lighter topical issues on GMTV would suit her.

"I'd still like to see Grainne loosen up a little more on TV. Off-screen she is incredibly engaging and smart and nice, but still sometimes on screen, she can appear a little cold."

His suggestion is that all talent needs time and good direction to evolve, and that UK broadcasters are better at recognising that. He cites the move of Dermot O'Leary from youth TV through to The X-Factor, and now interviewing political leaders in the BBC's pre-election programming.

"Like Dermot, Grainne hasn't come from nowhere. TG4, TV3, Sky News Ireland -- none of those broadcasters would have had her launch their news services if they weren't confident in her. GMTV know they are not bringing in a novice, but she is a fresh new face to the UK audience."

Another Irish TV insider suggests that Grainne has been pigeon-holed as a "shiny-floor presenter" by her stint on The All-Ireland Talent Show and a move to the UK might allow a fresh start. ('Shiny-floor' being industry slang for the type of light entertainment shows where the floor is covered in a 'showbizzy' plastic overlay.)

That's presuming that Seoige dislikes her move from hard news to a frothier agenda. During her three-year stint on Seoige and O'Shea (Seoige, in its last year), she seemed particularly enamoured of her outside broadcasts from the set of Strictly Come Dancing.

And, presuming the UK wants her full-time, who wouldn't be tempted to move to a market where the rewards for making it are sweeter?

"Not many people are on that million-dollar deal, but in my experience the money you make in presenting in England is at least two or three times what it would be here," says Emma Ledden. "It is a very well-paid job."

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/celebrity-news-gossip/at-36-could-grainne-still-make-it-big-on-british-tv-2161080.html

Breaking the sex code

I adore researching these essays on classic Hollywood. From Saturday's Review section in the Irish Independent.

Red hot in black & white
As Liam Neeson's new film is slammed as 'a porno farce', Susan Daly looks back at Hollywood's more innocent age -- or was it?

Saturday April 10 2010

The opening of a movie starring Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore should be cause for celebration. So why the tightly pursed lips among film critics?

Chloe, a tale of sexual obsession in which a housewife hires a high-class prostitute to seduce her husband in order to test his fidelity, was the movie Neeson was shooting when his wife Natasha Richardson died in a skiing accident last year. Despite the goodwill out there towards Neeson for this reason, Chloe was not well received when it opened in the US this past week.

The New Yorker called it a "porno farce"; the New York Post "a Skinemax movie cloaked in art house fancy dress".

When Chloe did the rounds here a few weeks earlier -- perhaps testing this side of the Atlantic first because we're, you know, European and supposedly more blasé about the kinky stuff -- it didn't do much better.

Chloe does, however, serve the purpose of showing how far we've moved from the censorious age of cinema.

Seventy years ago, at the height of the notorious Hays Code for films, married couples weren't even allowed to sleep in the same bed on screen, never mind indulge in a ménage à trois.

This has not been so much a gradual descent into a sexual free-for-all on screen, as the movies coming full circle.

The Victorian era, stereotyped as an age in which folk went around trussing their piano legs in frilly ankle-warmers, was quite libertarian about moving pictures. George Melies, a famous pioneer of cinema, was quick to churn out an "adult" film, After The Ball, in 1897, featuring a racy nude scene.

The new century then found itself enthralled to film's first sexpot, Theda Bara. It was the era of the silent movie but words were made redundant by Bara's transparent outfits, nipple tassels and sexually-voracious expressions.

But the excesses of Hollywood in the Roaring Twenties culminated in a series of scandals, the most notorious of which saw actor Fatty Arbuckle accused of raping and killing the starlet Virginia Rappe. The calls to clean up 'Sin City', as Los Angeles was being labelled, were getting louder.

Will Hays at the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA) came up with a list of 'Don'ts and Be Carefuls' for movie-makers in 1927. No excessive (over 3 seconds) and lustful kissing -- and if it happened anywhere in the vicinity of a bed, at least one of the parties had to have a foot on the ground.

Hollywood studios, heading into the Depression of the 1930s and desperate to attract audiences, pretty much ignored the cautions. The response of the censors was to introduce an expanded Hays Code in 1930. Sex was for married people only, and where affairs had to be mentioned, they should not be "presented attractively".

Sex was not "the proper subject for comedy" (no Carry On . . . movies, then). Dance moves that encouraged "movement of the breasts" were regarded as pure filth. The new, iron-cast code was formulated by a Jesuit, Fr Daniel Lord.

The Hollywood Reporter asked in 1931: "Does any producer pay attention to the 'Hays Code'?", knowing no one did. At this time, Jean Harlow was still getting away with asking, "Would you be shocked if I put on something more comfortable?" in Hell's Angel (1930), while Maureen O'Sullivan's Jane went skinny-dipping with Tarzan in the 1932 and 1934 loincloth-and-vine films.

Resistance to the censorious overlords was futile, however. By 1933, the powerful Catholic League of Decency had launched a 'down with this sort of thing' crusade on the movies. In 1939, Gone With The Wind producer David O Selznick was fined $5,000 for leaving the final word intact in what is now cinema's most quotable lines: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

Not everyone could afford to do a Selznick but, this being an industry of wheeler-dealers, creative ways were found to circumvent the code. Mae West films were jam-packed with double entendres, the brazen blonde firing off lines like "I feel like a million tonight -- but one at a time".

And where would Bogie and Bacall be without word play? "You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together -- and blow." (To Have and Have Not, 1944).

West was particularly crafty. She used to write outrageous "decoy" scenes into risqué movies like I'm No Angel (1933) so that the moral guardians would focus on cutting those and let other, more subtly raunchy, material slip through.

A great deal of nod-nod, wink-wink was employed to keep the audience in on the joke. No one was under any illusion that Bette Davis's "nightclub hostess" in Marked Woman (1937) was a euphemism for prostitute. Similarly, Claire Trevor's woman of the night in Dead End (1937) is said to be suffering from consumption when it is clear from her implied occupation it was more likely to be syphilis.

Where the explicit was no longer allowed, the implicit became a loaded currency. Metaphors were everywhere, from Bela Lugosi's blood-sucking kisses in Dracula (1931) to the shared cigarettes that acted as a substitute for sex in Now, Voyager (1942).

By the 1950s, Alfred Hitchcock was the master at breaking the code. From James Stewart's phallic, voyeuristic telephoto lens in Rear Window (1954) to the provocative question, "Do you want a leg or a breast?" during a picnic in To Catch A Thief (1955), his films were seething with what the League of Decency would probably call ulterior motives.

He had been practising for some time -- the famous kiss between Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in his 1946 film Notorious appears to ignore the three-second rule as they move through the apartment in a marathon snog. In fact, Hitchcock had Bergman and Grant kiss briefly but repeatedly while Grant took a phone call. The illusion is that the kiss goes on and on, but no actual rules were broken.

Others used more brazen tactics to titillate. The code enforcers were gentler on a film if it purported to purvey a moral message. This resulted in a sudden demand for films in the "sexual hygiene" genre, many of which were of dubious educational value.

Ultimately, as foreign films (not bound by the code) made inroads into US theatres and some distributors began to break links with the MPPDA, the code lost its grip and was scrapped in 1968. The new "golden age" of American cinema of the 1970s could not have flourished otherwise.

Even so, some of Hollywood's greatest movies were made within the confines of the code. Even the cartoonists were in on it. In Tweety Bird's first screen appearance in 1942, one cat trying to catch him says to another, "Give me the bird! Give me the bird!" The second cat replies: "If the Hays office would only let me, I'd give him the bird, alright!"

One imagines the reference to sticking up one's middle finger sailed over the heads of watching kiddies -- but hit Hays where it hurt.

ULTERIOR MOTIVES: Films with hidden meanings
King Kong (1933): The finished film was heavily edited but still managed to raise hackles for its perceived inter-racial love story (banned by the Code) as represented by the beauty and the beast. Kong was punished by falling off the most phallic-looking erection in New York, the Empire State Building.
It Happened One Night (1934): Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert chastely share a bedroom by hanging a blanket (“the wall of Jericho”) between their single beds. In the final scene, when Colbert signals her love for Gable, there is no literal consummation – but the blanket is seen to fall to the floor as a trumpet sounds out.
The 39 Steps (1935): As mentioned, unmarried couples were not permitted to sleep in the same room. So Alfred Hitchcock – who else? – inserted a plot device that had Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll handcuffed together and forced to share a bedroom. It was out of their control, see?
Citizen Kane (1941): Kane’s lost sleigh, inscribed ‘Rosebud’, was at face value a metaphor for loss of innocence. Director Orson Welles happened to know it was also a pet name that newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst – lampooned by the film - had for his mistress’s nether regions.
Red Dust (1942): Jean Harlow is in a love triangle with Clark Gable and Mary Astor. In the final scene, while reading a children’s story, Harlow mutters: “A chipmunk and a rabbit. Hey, I wonder how this comes out?”
The Big Sleep (1946): Humphrey Bogart shares a drink with a bookshop assistant during a rainstorm, and she removes her spectacles. Next thing we see, Bogie is leaving the bookshop. As the rain has completely stopped, we can assume he had lots of time to… buy some books. A similarly suggestive fadeout is used when Ilsa visits Rick’s flat, alone, in Casablanca (1942).
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946): The 1980s version of the movie didn’t skimp on kitchen-table knee-tremblers, but the original had to make do with lingering shots of a “Man Wanted” sign in the diner window, sizzling meat on the grill and wild cats playfighting to signal sexual tension.
Rebel Without A Cause (1955): James Dean wasn’t the true rebel here – it was Sal Mineo’s Plato with his crush on Dean and a picture of movie star Alan Ladd in his school locker. Of course, true to the Code, the ‘sexual deviant’ (as homosexuality was then classed) was punished by death.
North By Northwest (1959): Alfred Hitchcock excelled his own history of sexual innuendo by getting Eva Marie Saint to tell Cary Grant: “You’re a big boy now” before sending the couple off into a blatantly phallic closing shot of a train carrying the newlyweds off into a tunnel.
Kiss Me, Stupid (1964): Dean Martin shows streetwalker Kim Novak around the house where she is to pose as his wife with the comment: “It’s small, but it’s clean.” Cue a knowing giggle from the worldy Ms Novak.
Goldfinger (1964): The Hays Code was on the way out but the 007 movies were establishing the penchant for double entendres that allowed them to moonlight as family movies, despite the sexual undertow. This one was hardly subtle though, with its Bond girls Pussy Galore and Holly Goodhead.


FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/film-cinema/red-hot-in-black-white-2132690.html

Bad boys, bad boys, what you gonna do?

The truth about stars who say they're sex addicts
Yes, there is such an illness -- but many just use it as an excuse for bad behaviour, says Susan Daly

Saturday March 27 2010

When Eldrick Tont Woods was still the king of clean, Nike deified him in their iconic, oft-parodied, "I am Tiger Woods" TV commercial.

Thirteen years later, those parodies could be updated with the addition of those five little words: "I am Tiger Woods -- and I'm a sex addict."

It has become the justification du jour for celebrities caught with their trousers down. We especially expected to hear it last Sunday when the man with a catalogue of multimillion-dollar endorsements and a marriage to save gave his first post-rehab interviews.

Clearly, being labelled a serial philanderer is not good for the image, implying as it does a selfish, immoral, undisciplined personality. Applying the term 'addiction' to such behaviour reclassifies it as a psychological disorder, thereby rebranding the trespasser as a victim.

It was thought at one point that erstwhile England captain John Terry might spend a highly publicised spell in a sex-treatment programme to atone publicly for his sins against his wife and team-mates. Likewise, the newly separated Ashley Cole.

Russell Brand, David Duchovny and Halle Berry's ex-husband Eric Benet have all confessed in the past to 'suffering' from sexual addiction.

Whether such high-profile figures are chemically addicted to sex -- or just happily promiscuous until they are forced to give it a more PR-friendly label -- is up for debate.

Interestingly, Woods has refused to use the term 'sexual addiction' in his latest round of mea culpas ahead of the US Masters. He needs to start building bridges with his fans and big-name brands -- and quickly.

His people afforded two television sports stations five minutes each last weekend to quiz Woods on his 'recovery' after 45 days of in-patient treatment. Woods used terms like "disgusting" and "denial" to describe the "bad things" he had done; but also triumphal words like "conquering" and "strength" to ascribe his recovery to his own depth of character. Love the sinner, not the sin.

But when asked directly what exactly he had been in treatment for, Woods refused to elaborate. "That's a private matter," he said.

Dr Eoin Stephens, head of training at the Irish Centre for Sexual Addictions, is adamant that sexual addiction is very real, but that the term can also be abused.

"It can certainly be misused and overdone as a diagnosis," he says.

"This happens partly in the religious right in America, where any sexual behaviour deemed unacceptable can be classified in that way."

Tiger's retreat from the words, he says, could be read in many ways.

"One possibility is that he doesn't want the label or it could be that his behaviour wasn't actually as a result of sexual addiction. I've met people who aren't really out of control but have a sense of entitlement to inappropriate behaviour."

Relationship psychotherapist David Kavanagh doesn't like the use of the term at all. Instead, he describes the "sexual compulsivity" that he believes is causing problems in the relationships of roughly one-10th of his clients.

"In some situations, celebrities have used sex addiction as a get-out-of-jail card," he says, "but I think it is being seen as a shame-based description.

"People think it's easy for famous people to trot it out to evade blame for their behaviour but in some ways, it's more socially acceptable to say you are an alcoholic than to say you are a sex addict."

The medical community does not universally accept sexual addiction as a genuine psychological diagnosis. The committee behind the next edition of the psychiatrists' bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is due out in 2013, has announced that they won't be including it in the giant tome.

The proposed diagnosis for excessive sexual behaviours that impact negatively on one's relationships, work and mental health, will be called "hypersexual disorder".

So, no, it's not an official diagnosis, says Dr Eoin Stephens, "but then neither was post-traumatic stress until 1980."

This public perception is also often that sex rehab centres and celeb PR gurus are trying to medicalise what is simply bad behaviour.

"If I have to have an addiction, I'll take that one," goes the joke.

David Duchovny's announcement in 2008 that he was getting treatment for sexual addiction was accompanied by predictable sniggers, because at the time he was playing the role of a sex-obsessed writer on the TV show Californication. The 2007 comedy Blades of Glory made the issue its own punchline, with a sex addicts' support group meeting descending into a frantic orgy.

Some celebs have been back-pedalling furiously away from their supposed sex addictions. Musician Eric Benet went into sex-addiction rehab in 2002 but later told New York magazine: "In retrospect, it's not what I would label my situation".

Michael Douglas, who is habitually trotted out as an example of A-list sex addiction, has said that he "voluntarily went into rehab" because of a drink problem around 1990.

"Some smart-ass editor said, 'Oh, another boring story about an actor going to rehab. Let's give him sex addiction.'"

The message is that saying you're a sex addict isn't 'sexy' at all.

"There is a perception, even among our other clients here, that those who come into us with a sexual addiction isn't really as serious as a substance addiction like, say, heroin," says Dr Fiona Weldon, clinical director of the Rutland treatment centre in Dublin.

"It doesn't take long for that misperception to lift because they soon see how devastating it can be. Whole families are destroyed by it, whole lives."

She categorically insists that sexual addiction is real and that as a psychological addiction, it can be much stronger than an addiction to an external substance.

"Take nicotine, for example; it will leave the system in three or four days.

"Behavioural addictions such as sex or gambling can be so much more complex. It is not simply the addiction to the high of the sexual content itself. In most cases, the anticipation of the sexual act is what gives the greater high and it becomes more and more difficult to achieve that same high.

"People end up going to huge expense, effort and time chasing it, to the expense of everything else in their life."

Psychotherapist David Kavanagh points out that whatever you call excessive, repetitive sexual behaviours, we may be conditioned to think it's more normal than it is.

"Maybe pornography isn't actually harmless to your marriage, perhaps it's just an acclimatisation," he says.

"The sex industry has a huge investment in making us believe that going to a strip club for a stag night is harmless fun, but no one knows definitively if that is true."

For now, the spotlight remains on Tiger Woods. In his latest interview with ESPN, he may have given the key to his bad behaviour.

"And as I said earlier in my statement, I felt entitled."

A fit, wealthy young athlete with time away from the wife to succumb to the temptations laid before him: is that sexual addiction or opportunism?