James O’Mahony was born in 1888 in John Street on the north side of Cork city to Michael and Catherine O’Mahony. He was orphaned at a young age and started school on the south side of the city in South Presentation Convent. He began dancing in St Dominic’s GAA Club on the north side of the city and was friendly with Willie and Freddie Murray, well-known Irish dancers of the day. James O’Mahony was a barber by trade and worked in Midleton, where he met his wife, Mary Cunningham. In 1935, they moved to Castlemartyr, where James opened a barber shop. He also taught Irish dancing in Castlemartyr and around East Cork. He died in 1973.
Richard ‘Dick’ Cameron was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1929. He came to Ireland in the mid-1950s and was heavily involved in the folk revival of the 1960s and 1970s and instrumental in the establishment of the An Góilín Singers Club, founded by Tim Dennehy and Dónal de Barra in 1979. His warm baritone made him popular on the radio, where he hosted the Ballads of a Saturday series on Radio Telefís Éireann and appeared in many other folk music programmes. He died in Dublin in 1997.
Thomas Spring Rice was born in Limerick on 8 February 1790, the only son in a family of three. His parents were Stephen Edward Rice of Mount Trenchard, county Limerick, and Catherine Spring, only child and heiress of Thomas Spring of Castlemain, county Kerry. He had a distinguished career as a politician, representing Limerick in Parliament from 1820 to 1832, and the borough of Cambridge from 1832 to 1839. He was made Under Secretary of State for the Home Department in 1827, and served as joint Secretary to the Treasury from 1830 to 1834 under Lord Grey. His other appointments included Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1835 to 1839, and Comptroller of the Exchequer from 1835 until his death in 1866. He was raised to the peerage as first Baron Monteagle of Brandon in the county of Kerry on 5 September 1839. In his role as politician, Thomas Spring Rice was instrumental in the authorisation of the ordnance survey of Ireland at six inches to a mile in 1824, and the establishment of the Irish National School system in 1832.
Thomas Spring Rice married twice, firstly (in 1811) Lady Theodosia Pery, second daughter of the first Earl of Limerick, by whom he had eight children. In 1841, following the death of his first wife in 1839, Lord Monteagle married Mary Anne Marshall. There were no children from the second marriage. Following Lord Monteagle’s death on 7 February 1866, the title passed to his grandson and namesake, Thomas Spring Rice (1849-1926).
Thomas Spring Rice enjoyed great popularity in his native city of Limerick. In 1820, he was invited to stand as an election candidate against Charles Vereker in an attempt to free the borough from the corruption of its Corporation and the tight control exercised by the Vereker family. When defeated, Thomas Spring Rice appealed to parliament to have the election result overturned on grounds that many of the Vereker voters were non-resident in the city. The enquiry which followed his petition resulted in the imprisonment of the city Recorder for prevarication and the declaration of Thomas Spring Rice as MP for Limerick. In parliament, he instigated an investigation into the affairs of the old Corporation of Limerick, which resulted in the passing of the Limerick Regulation Act of 1823.
In 1832, Thomas Spring Rice declared that he would not be seeking re-election in the city, mainly owing to his opposition to the proposed Repeal of the Act of Union. From 1832 to 1839, he represented the borough of Cambridge in the parliament. His many contributions to Limerick city are commemorated in the painting The Chairing of Thomas Spring Rice, MP, by William Turner, commissioned by the Limerick Chamber of Commerce in 1822, and a statue by Thomas Kirk, erected by the Barrington family at Pery Square in 1829 on top of a monument designed by Henry Aaron Baker.
Aurelio Galfetti was born in Biasca, Ticino, Switzerland on 2 April 1936. He is regarded as one of the main exponents of Ticino architecture of the twentieth century. From 1954 to 1960 he studied architecture at the ETH Zürich and in 1960 he opened his own architect's office in Lugano. From 1962 to 1970 he worked in a joint office with Flora Ruchat and Ivo Trümpy, and from 1970 to 1978 on various projects together with Livio Vacchini, Luigi Snozzi, Rino Tami and Mario Botta. In 1984 he was visiting professor at the EPF Lausanne and 1987 at the UP8 in Paris. In 1996, together with Mario Botta, Galfetti founded the Academia di Architettura in Mendrisio, whose director he was from 1996 to 2001.
Galfetti's major works include the single family dwelling Rotalinti (Bellinzona, 1960-61), the open-air swimming pool in Bellinzona (1967-70), the central post office in Bellinzona (1977-85), the restoration of Burg Castelgrande (1981-91) and th office and commercial building Ulysses (Lausanne, 1991-1994). He died in Bellinzona, Switzerland on 5 December 2021 aged 85.
Adrienne Brown was born in Dublin and began her dance education with ballet classes. She later developed an interest in contemporary dance and spent three years studying at London Contemporary Dance School. Between 1991 and 1998, she attended the Martha Graham Center of Dance in New York, where she gained first place in her teacher-training certificate course. She was co-founder with Anne Lise Schmitt of New Balance Dance Company in 1987, and a founding member of Dance Ireland, acting as its chair from 2008 to 2013. Adrienne taught movement to actors at the Gaiety School of Acting for twenty years, developing a programme suited to the needs of the training actor. Since 1994, she has been teaching technique and choreography at Inchicore College of Further Education.
As a choreographer, Adrienne has remained true to dance as a specific form of expression emerging from the mastery of the human body in motion. For her creative work, Adrienne draws on movement, narrative, text, musicality, and compositional elements. She has collaborated with several composers, including Paul Hayes, JJ Vernon, Michael Seaver, Mel Mercier, Trevor Knight, and Siobhan Cleary, and has taken inspiration from the writings of Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Paula Meehan, Charlotte Mew, and Beth Ann Fennelly. Her repertoire, which has been staged in Ireland, England, and France, comprises over 40 choreographies, including 'Fin de Siecle' (1989), 'Of No Dreams Remember' (1989), 'Six Women in Search of a Dance' (1990), 'The Wounds of Art' (1990), 'Two Into One Won’t Go' (1991), 'Cry' (1992), 'For Delia' (1993), 'The Well' (1994), 'The Sin Eater' (1995), 'Meeting Points & Translations' (1995), 'Four Points of a Circle' (1995), 'Sculptura' (1996), 'This Happened' (1996), 'Mapping a Route Home' (1996), 'Love is a Beautiful Bondage, Too' (1997), 'You Who Have Never Arrived' (2001), 'Voices' (2002), 'Who Moves You' (2004), 'A Study of Bach’s Musical Offering (I)' (2005), 'A Study of Bach’s Musical Offering (II)' (2006), 'Lumen' (2010), 'One' (2011), 'Arctic Birds’ Song' (2012), and 'Exodus: A New Earth' (2013).
In 1997, Adrienne was the first Irish choreographer to be invited to participate in the Righting Dance project at the Institute of Choreography and Dance, Cork. This was a mentored research project, which took place over three years under Adrienne’s chosen mentor, the international choreographer Kim Brandstrup of Arc Dance. This extensive creative process gave rise to a full-length dance work, 'Colmcille', which premiered in 2000 and toured Ireland in 2001.
Between 2002 and 2006, Adrienne completed a BA degree in University College Dublin, graduating with honours in Music and English, and an honours MA in American Studies. Following her MA thesis in 2006, she was awarded an Ad Astra Research Scholarship from UCD to undertake a four-year PhD in Musicology and Dance, leading to the completion of a doctoral dissertation, 'Meaning Indicators in Twentieth-Century Music and Dance', in 2012.