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The Irish National Youth Ballet Company (originally named the Irish Junior Ballet Company) was co-founded by Anne Campbell-Crawford and Professor Jean Wallis of the Akademie der Tanzen, Heidelberg, Germany. The company had its first auditions in 1995 and gave its first performance in February 1996 at the Royal Hibernian, Gallaher Gallery, Dublin. Its dancers are aged 10-21 years, and a junior level for children aged 8 and over was established in September 1999. The company aims to provide young dancers an enriching experience during their formative years and to give them a flavour of what it might be like to pursue a career in dance.

The City of Dublin Championships was established in 2007 as an annual international competition. It takes place over two weekends each year, for graded dancers in January and Open Championship and graded adult dancers in March. The competition has attracted participants from all over Ireland, the UK, France, Germany, Poland, Norway, Finland, Russia, Australia, Japan, Taipei, Czech Republic, Italy, Israel, The Netherlands, and Austria. One of the unique aspects of the championships is the City of Dublin Plate Competition (junior and senior), in which the top three dancers in each championship compete for the overall champion award (plate). Instead of the traditional costumes, the dancers must wear black outfits for the plate competitions.

Swythamley Historical Society (SHS) was founded on 1 September 2003 to promote interest in the history of the Swythamley Estate and the surrounding area of the Staffordshire Moorlands, north Staffordshire, on the Cheshire border in England.

Robert Arthur Stradling is professor emeritus of history at Cardiff University, Wales, and a leading authority on the Spanish Civil War. He has published extensively on the topic and made a number of documentaries for Spanish television and BBC Wales.

Brenda Springer (née Boylan) was born in 1942 in Mallow and joined Mary Mulcahy’s School of Irish Dancing at the age of three. She later trained with Maureen Nugent, Maureen Howell, and Tommy Cullen, and in 1965 gained her teaching qualifications. She established the Springer School of Dancing in Mallow, which trained children for Irish dancing competitions, and the Mallow International Folk Dancers, which consisted of older dancers interested in performing rather than competing. In the early 1980s she gave up teaching and became an adjudicator, in which capacity she has travelled around the world. She remains a well-known figure in the Irish dancing circles.

Elizabeth Darina Laracy was born on 30 March 1917 in Rathgar, Dublin as one of four daughters of Patrick Joseph Laracy and Mary Cecilia née King. She studied history and political science at University College Dublin, graduating with a BA 1937 and an MA in 1939. In 1940, she moved to Sorbonne to study for her doctorate on the strength of a scholarship. In 1940, she moved to Italy, eventually settling in Rome to work as a correspondent to Herald Tribune and the International News Service. A vocal anti-fascist, she was forced to flee Italy to Switzerland in 1941. Here, she met the politician and prominent anti-fascist novelist Secondino Tranquilli, better known by his pseudonym Ignazio Silone (1900-1978), who was also in exile. The couple returned to Rome in October 1944 to work against fascism and married two months later. Following the death of her husband in 1978, Darina finished his last, uncompleted novel, Severina, which was published in 1981. Fluent in several languages, she translated her husband's works and became an important reference point for scholars of Ignazio Silone's life and works. Darina Silone died in Rome on 25 July 2003.