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Anne (Annie) McGowan née Browne (1879-1965) was the daughter of Patrick Browne, a baker, and his wife Susan, of Clare Street, Limerick. In 1900, she married Michael McGowan (1878-1942) whose father Daniel McGuane (1843-1920) was originally from Poulwillian, Miltown Malbay, County Clare. Daniel, a tailor, had come to Limerick in the 1860s with his wife Mary Anne Foley, a seamstress from Kilkee, to run a business premises on the corner of Catherine Street and Roches Street. When in Limerick, Daniel changed the spelling of his surname from McGuane McGowan.

Michael McGowan worked first on the railway in Limerick and later in Inchicore Works in Dublin. In 1915, he joined the Royal Dublin Fusiliers seeking adventure and an escape from the large family he now had to take care of. Michael was sent to the Western Front where he was poisoned by gas and evacuated to a hospital in Birmingham. He was discharged from the Army in 1919. His wife returned to Limerick during the war and lived with her children in Doyle’s Cottages off John’s Street, which was not far from Limerick Jail. In order to support her mother, Anne’s eldest child Sarah (Sally) got a job as a printer’s assistant in McKern’s Printing Works in Limerick city and, on her mother’s insistence, joined the Transport Union. When Sarah and 11 other girls were offered a pay increase of two shillings and six pence on condition that they leave the Union, Sarah was the only girl to refuse the offer as a result of which she was sacked. She later worked as a waitress in a Catherine Street restaurant.

During and after the Civil War, Annie and Sarah McGowan and Annie’s son Timothy (Tadgh) McGowan delivered food and parcels of books, magazines and cigarettes to Republican prisoners in Limerick Jail and continued to send these to prisoners transferred to the Curragh internment camp in County Kildare. Given the family connections with West Clare, most of the prisoners they assisted were from that area. One of the correspondents, Thomas Keane, was from Carrigaholt, where a Keane’s pub exists to this day.

Edward Patrick McGrath was born in New York City on 8 December 1929, the son of Edward Patrick McGrath and Elizabeth née Breen. His parents had emigrated to the United States from Belfast. He received a bachelor’s degree from New York University in 1958 and a master’s degree from Brooklyn College in 1960.

Edward McGrath began his career in journalism at the New York Herald Tribune in the 1950s. Over the years, he worked in publishing and public relations. During the final twelve years of his life he was president of McGrath Associates, a corporate communications consulting firm. Edward was also a writer. His published non-fiction works included articles on such far-ranging subjects as whaling and witchcraft. He had an interest in Irish literature and wrote fiction for personal pleasure. In 1974, Edward and his wife moved from New York City to Weston, Connecticut where among other things he held the position of chairman of the Library Board. Edward McGrath died in Weston on 23 August 1994.

Michael Meehan is a retired academic and former member of the ruling body of An Coimisiún.

Merce Cunningham Dance Company was founded in 1953 by the American dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham (1919-2009), one of the pioneers and leaders of American modern dance.

The first mention to this accountancy firm appears in the newspapers in 1905, when it operated under the name C. W. Metcalfe & Co. In November 1920, Hugh Lilburn took over the practice. In 1941, he and his colleague James Leslie Enright were made full partners and the company name was changed accordingly to Metcalfe, Lilburn and Enright on 23 May 1941. It was one of the leading accountancy firms in Limerick city in the mid-1900s. In 1976, the firm merged with Craig Gardner & Co., which was subsequently absorbed into Price Waterhouse Coopers.

Katarína Mojžišová is a Slovakian dance artist who worked in Ireland between 2005 and 2012. Born in Uherské Hradišt? in the former Czechoslovakia, she gained an MA in Dance from VŠMU Bratislava in 1999. Her diverse career includes dance, film, theatre, and performance art. She has a particular interest in experimental dance works and cross-genre projects, such as O1, a 7-hour performance created in collaboration with sound artist Robin Parmar in 2006, and The Rite of Spring, Limerick (Commissions Award of The Arts Council and Limerick City Council), performed in the Parkway Shopping Centre on the day of vernal equinox in 2007. She has also created numerous choreographic works supported by art institutions and dance companies, including Parsifal Project (commissioned by Framemakers Symposium 2005); Dragon (supported by Daghdha Dance Company and selected for Dublin Fringe Festival 2006); and The Auction (commissioned by Excursions: Performance Festival 2005 and selected for Have-U-Met-Nosti Festival, Dublin, 2007). Katarína was also involved in the former Mentoring Programme of Daghdha Dance Company and has lectured on dance and performance at the University of Limerick and the Sculpture and Combined Media of Limerick School of Art and Design.

The Monsells, of French extraction, were a plantation family from Dorsetshire, England, who had settled in Tervoe, county Limerick by the 1660s. Many of the early members of the family were prosperous merchants and landowners, most notably Samuel Monsell (d. 1735), a shipping merchant whose business extended from Ireland to England, France, Holland and Spain. Of his several sons, the eldest, William (1705-1772) became a lawyer. His second marriage in 1751 to Dymphna Pery (d. 1774), sister of Edmond Sexton Pery, MP and three-time Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, gave the Monsells not only a distinguished pedigree but considerable political influence. Their son, Colonel William Thomas Monsell (1754-1836), married Hannah Strettell of Dublin, whose father Amos Strettell was director of the Bank of Ireland. Their younger son, Thomas, became Archdeacon of Derry and was father to the noted hymnologist John Samuel Bewley Monsell and to the celebrated botanical artist Diana Conyngham Ellis née Monsell. Colonel Monsell’s elder son, William, was grandfather to and namesake of the distinguished politician William Monsell (1812-1894). His first wife, Anna Maria Wyndham Quin (1814-1855), whom he married in 1836, was daughter of the second Earl of Dunraven of Adare Manor, county Limerick, then one of the wealthiest men in Ireland. William Monsell was created 1st Baron Emly of Tervoe in 1874. The title became extinct on the death of his only surviving son, Thomas William Gaston Monsell (1858-1932), from his second marriage to Berthe de Montigny Boulainvilliers (d. 1890).