Dr. Catherine Foley is a dancer and musician. Her undergraduate degree is in music from Cork (NUI) and she holds a doctorate in ethnochoreology (Irish traditional step dance) from London. She worked as a collector of Irish traditional music, song and dance for Muckross House, Killarney, Co. Kerry, and has lectured, performed, published, and given workshops internationally. She designed the MA Ethnochoreology and the MA Irish Traditional Dance Performance courses at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick, and acted as director of both courses until her retirement in 2019. Catherine was instrumental in the establishment and development of the National Dance Archive of Ireland and served as its first director. She is also founder and Chair Emerita of Dance Research Forum Ireland.
Ann Gallagher, the daughter of Frank and Cecilia Gallagher, was born in Dublin. She attended the Abbey School of Ballet under Muriel Kelly’s direction as a child, and it was at the Abbey School that her lifelong interest in ballet started. She was interested in and exposed to all aspects of Dublin’s cultural life from an early age, and began visiting ballets and collecting programmes, which form the core of this collection.
Gerard Patrick Gallivan was born in Limerick on 29 July 1920 and grew up on Henry Street. A contemporary of Frank McCourt, Gallivan’s recollections of his home city differed considerably from those described in Angela’s Ashes, although the two men lived in very similar spheres. Gallivan was educated at Crescent College and graduated in 1939. He began his working career in England, where he emigrated in 1940. Here he also met his wife, whom he married in 1945. A year later, they returned to Ireland and settled in Limerick, where Gallivan established a career in the airline industry. In 1952, he was transferred to Dublin, where he was to live for the rest of his life.
Gallivan’s writing career commenced at the age of 18, when he wrote his first novel, The Hawk, but failed to get it published. He later found his feet as a playwright and over his long career wrote more than 40 plays, many of which were produced at the Gate Theatre, Abbey Theatre, Elbana Theatre and Olympia Theatre in Dublin, and the Lyric Theatre in Belfast. He also did a lot of journeyman work, contributing several episodes to the popular radio series Harbour Hotel and The Kennedys of Castleross, and for the television drama Kilmore House. Many of his stage scripts, such as Parnell, The Final Mission and The Lamb and the Fox, were also produced as radio plays.
Gerard Gallivan's works focus predominantly on Irish political history (particularly the foundation of the Irish State) and major Irish and English political and social figures such as Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Maude Gonne, W. B. Yeats, Noel Chamberlain, Eamonn De Valera, Michael Collins and Cardinal Newman. His published plays include Decision at Easter (1960); And a Yellow Singing Bird (1963); Mourn the Ivy Leaf (1965); Dev (1978); Watershed (1981), Lovesong (1984), and three volumes of Selected Plays (1999-2008). Among his best-known stage plays is The Stepping Stone, which was originally performed in 1963 and enjoyed a popular revival in Cork in 1997. Gallivan continued to write until the last months of his life. His later works included The Indomitable Lamb (1997), The Prudent Paramour (1997) and The Rusted Dagger (1998), all of which were broadcast as radio plays. His other late works included a family history The Gallivans of Limerick (1995), and a commissioned account of his working life, My Time in Irish Travel, published posthumously in 2004 as Ireland Enters the Air Age. He died on Christmas Day 2003.
Deirdre Grant was born in Wexford and was first introduced to contemporary dance in that town in 1984, when she joined the Barefoot Youth Dance Company. She later gained a BA in Dance with Education from Middlesex University, London, undertook post-graduate training in Community and Youth Dance, and has recently trained with Joan Davis (Certificate of Somatic Studies). In 1999, she co-founded Myriad Dance with Brid Malone, and remains the company’s artistic director. Grant is the author of Are We Dancing Yet, published by Wexford County Council in December 2011.
Myriad Dance successfully promoted dance awareness, participation, and appreciation regionally through various dance performance-based initiatives (mainly site specific works) and development initiatives, including the Sonraigh Youth Dance Festival and the Pulse Youth Dance Programme (2001-2008) in partnership with Wexford County Council. The latter was expanded in 2009 and continued to operate under the name Education and Community Programme @ Myriad as the largest youth dance partnership with a local authority in Ireland. In July 2009, Myriad Dance moved into the newly built Wexford Opera House, in which they were one of two resident dance companies. Over the years, the dance company’s intense focus in youth and education left it at odds with its original role as a production company. As a consequence, the dance company was wound down in 2015.
Michael Meehan is a retired academic and former member of the ruling body of An Coimisiún.
Thomas G. (Tom) Nestor was born in 1936 in Coolcappa, Rathkeale, County Limerick as a farmer’s son and one of ten children. He was educated in St Flannan’s College, Ennis, in 1950-1954, and began his working career in 1955, first with Shannon Sales and Catering Service, and then with an American company in Ennis, where he lived from 1981 to 1990. Nestor later became self-employed and ran a training and consultancy programme for middle managers until his retirement in 2004. He married in 1964 and settled in Birr, County Offaly.
Nestor began his writing career in 1964 with two articles about rural Ireland, which were published in the Manchester Guardian. These were followed by Twilight in Suburbia, written for Donacha O’Dulaing for his radio programme A Munster Journal. The work was however rejected. His published works include three radio plays broadcast by BBC and RTÉ, some thirty short stories published in Scotland, USA and Australia, and three novels: The Keeper of Absalom’s Island (1999), The Blue Pool (2002) and Talking to Kate (2009). From 1964 to 1998 Nestor also contributed to The Limerick Leader with his column My Life and Times.
Thomas Nestor died on 22 December 2023 at the age of 87.
A pioneer in Irish fiction, Kate O’Brien was born in Limerick on 3 December 1897 to horse-dealer Thomas O’Brien and his wife, Catherine Thornhill O’Brien. One of ten children, O’Brien had three older sisters, Mary, Clare and Nance (or Anne), and six brothers, John (or Jack), Thomas, Eric, Michael, Michael Alphonsus and Gerard William. Tragedy struck the young family in 1903 when Catherine O’Brien died of cancer. Kate O’Brien was just over five years of age at this time and was to become the youngest boarder at Laurel Hill, a French convent school in Limerick. O’Brien’s father passed away in 1916, and in that same year Kate received a county council scholarship to read French and English in University College Dublin.
Kate O’Brien graduated from University College Dublin with a B.A. degree in 1919, moving to England where she worked as a free-lance journalist for The Sphere, followed by a position in the foreign language department of The Manchester Guardian Weekly. In 1921, O’Brien moved to London, and taught at St. Mary’s Convent in Hampstead for approximately six months before travelling to the United States as a companion to her sister Nance and her husband Stephen O’Mara. O’Brien returned from the States in 1922 but this did not mark the end of her travels, moving to Spain that same year to work as a governess in Bilbao. O’Brien taught the children of the Areilza family over a ten-month period, forming a deep attachment to Spain that was to remain with her for the rest of her days. Returning to London in 1923, she married a young Dutchman, Gustaff Renier. However, this union was only to last eleven months before the couple separated.
Spanning nearly fifty years, Kate O’Brien’s literary career commenced in 1926 with the play Distinguished Villa. O’Brien’s first work was the result of a bet with a friend that she could write a play within a number of weeks. It was performed at the Aldwych Theatre in London on 2 May 1926 and was met with wide acclaim. Several other plays followed in 1927, including The Silver Roan, The Bridge and Set in Platinum. It was her first novel, Without My Cloak (published in 1931), however, that established O’Brien as a significant Irish writer. A chronicle of the Considine family, this work was awarded the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 1934, O’Brien produced her second novel, The Ante-Room. This was followed two years later by its unsuccessful adaptation for the stage in London’s Queen Theatre, and in addition, the first of two works to be banned by the Censorship of Publications Board in Ireland, a novel entitled Mary Lavelle. Also addressing the subject of Spain is the highly personal travelogue Farewell Spain published in 1937, largely in response to the events surrounding the Spanish Civil War. This work was subsequently banned in Franco’s Spain and the author was forbidden access to the country until 1957 with the intervention of the Irish Ambassador to Spain. O’Brien’s play The Schoolroom Window was performed that same year at the Manuscript Theatre Club in London.
In 1938, O’Brien’s fourth novel, Pray for the Wanderer was published, and followed two years later by The Land of Spices, her second work to be banned in Ireland. O’Brien spent the early years of the Second World War in Oxford and London, working for the British Ministry of Information. The writer moved to Devon in 1942 boarding in the house of novelist, E.M. Delafield, and over the next year published The Last of Summer, which was performed as a play at the Phoenix Theatre in London and the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin between 1944 and 1945. The publication English Diaries and Journals was produced in 1943. O’Brien’s seventh novel, That Lady, was published in 1946. A great success, this work was published in North America as For One Sweet Grape. The novel was adapted for the stage in November 1949, directed by Guthrie McClintic and starring Katherine Cornell as Ana de Mendoza. The play opened in the Martin Beck Theatre on Broadway, and in 1955, the novel was made into a motion picture.
Kate O’Brien returned to live in Ireland in 1950, buying a handsome property in Roundstone, county Galway. O’Brien continued to be productive in her new surroundings publishing her biographical work Teresa of Avila in 1951, followed by her eighth novel, The Flower of May in 1953. The writer travelled to Rome in Italy in the early months of 1954 in preparation for what was to become her ninth and final published novel, As Music and Splendour. A decade after her move to Roundstone, O’Brien returned to England, settling in Boughton, Kent. Whilst the 1960s did not yield any further fictional work, O'Brien produced another travelogue entitled My Ireland in 1962. A collection of reminiscences of her early family life, entitled Presentation Parlour, followed in 1963. In addition, the writer produced articles for different publications including her ‘Long Distance’ series in the Irish Times. O’Brien was involved with numerous literary organisations during her lifetime including P.E.N. and the Comunità Europea degli Scrittori (where she represented Ireland). Kate O’Brien died in Kent on 13 August 1974, aged 76, leaving behind a body of unfinished work including her memoirs and what would have been her tenth novel, Constancy.
Victoria O’Brien started her dance training at the Irish National College of Dance in Dublin and is a graduate of the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in Leeds. She undertook further studies at the Laban Centre, London and completed a PhD in dance history at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick. She is currently Dance Adviser at the Arts Council. An active dance historian and consultant, Victoria continues to research, lecture, and publish in the areas of Irish ballet history and cultural memory.
Liv O’Donoghue trained at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in the UK, graduating in 2007 with the Outstanding Achievement Award. She then joined the school’s graduate company, Verve, touring and performing internationally while also completing her Graduate Diploma in Performance. Since then, she has worked and toured extensively with distinguished dance companies and choreographers, including Irish Modern Dance Theatre, Rex Levitates Dance Company (later renamed Liz Roche Company), and with other artists, including composers Christian Mason and Benedict Schlepper-Connolly, and photographers Elena Galotta and Luca Truffarelli.
In addition to her collaboration with other artists, Liv O’Donoghue has developed her own choreographic practice. Her work has been shown at dance festivals in Ireland, Europe, Japan, and the USA. In 2011, she was Artist-in-Residence at the Hawk’s Well Theatre in Sligo. In 2012-2013, she undertook dance residencies at various European dance houses, including TanzQuarter in Vienna, as a Carte Blanche Artist for the multi-annual cooperation project Modul Dance. In 2012, she was also selected as an artist for the European dance project Act Your Age, in which choreographers research and create new work inspired and performed by senior individuals to tackle the issue of age and ageing. Her widely acclaimed work is supported by the Arts Council, Culture Ireland, and Dance Ireland.