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Dr Olive Beecher is a professional dancer and dance academic. She trained at the Nikolais/ Louis Dance School in New York under Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis and studied improvisation and somatics under Sara Pearson. On returning to Ireland, Beecher worked as a dance lecturer at Thomond College, University of Limerick and became a founder member of Daghdha Dance Company under the artistic direction of Mary Nunan. Beecher devised, choreographed, and performed contemporary dance works for and with the Company for four years between 1988 and 1992.

Beecher left Daghdha Dance Company to develop her own work and continued to study under internationally renowned teachers including Jill Clarke, Laurie Booth, Motion House, teachers from Hawkins, and Merdith Monk Company. Olive performed in New York, the UK, and in theatres throughout Ireland. She also became a dance academic, completing an MA in Ethnochoreology in 1998 and a PhD in therapeutic applications of modern dance in 2005 at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick.

Beecher is first and foremost a dance artist. Between 1987 and 2016 she has created more than 25 original dance/performance works and continues to practice as an artist. Her work is influenced by the experimental movement of the 1960s and 1970s in Europe and America. She is also interested in German expressionism, eastern and post-modern approaches to movement and performance, and pedestrian movement. Most of her creative ideas stem from her own life experiences.

Beecher’s academic interests include topics such as improvisation; creativity, theory, and practice; phenomenology; somatics and fundamentals of contemporary dance movement; arts, health, and well-being; integrated dance and special education; dance education and Rudolf Laban; ritual; and post-modernism. She has been a regular contributor to the Irish World Academy Seminar Series from 1999 to 2015 and has worked as a dance tutor at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick since 2006. She also delivers the dance education and world dance modules each year at University College Cork, which she wrote for their Physical Education and Sports Science degree programme in 2007. She also works in special education. The integration of theory and practice is a key feature of her teaching and lecturing style.

Róisín Cahalan was born and raised in Limerick. She trained at the Nolan School of Irish Dance for ten years and later at Scoil Rince Dal gCais under the direction of Anthony Costello. She is a five-time Munster Champion and has placed in the top three at the All-Irelands and British Nationals. Her highest placing at the World Championships was second.

After retiring from competition, Róisín attended the University of Limerick, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in business and a postgraduate degree in computer studies. Upon completion of her academic studies, she became a computer programmer in Dublin. Róisín put her career on hold when she joined the Riverdance Liffey Company in August 1996. She moved to the Lagan Company in January 1998 and returned to the Liffey Company in August 1998.

Barbara Clarke was born in Dublin in 1938. She started dancing at the age of four at the Burchill School of Dancing on St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, where she studied both ballet and tap. Her first stage appearance was in the Burchill School of Dancing Recital at the Gaiety Theatre in 1943 at the age of five. From the very beginning, she showed exceptional talent and enthusiasm, and steadily built up her skills by undertaking dance and teaching qualifications. As she progressed, she began to help Miss Burchill with the younger classes and continued to participate in the school’s regular recitals at the Gaiety Theatre. As there was no full-time work for dancers in Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s, Barbara trained as secretary at Alexandra College, Dublin, and worked in that capacity for a firm of stockbrokers in the city. She dedicated her spare time to dance, both as a performer and a choreographer, and gained countrywide publicity through her appearances in RTÉ’s popular programme, Shall We Dance?. She continued her involvement in the art form until 1992, when a stroke called a halt to her active dancing career.

Rosemarie Cockayne was born Rosemarie Edwina Biggers on 4 November 1943 in Montreal, Canada. Her parents were Harold Edwin Biggers (1900-1979), a barrister and political journalist from Australia, and Evelyn Linda née Cockayne (1906-1980), an English-born commercial artist who had emigrated to Australia with her mother and sister in 1913. In 1944, the Biggers family returned from Canada to London, where Rosemarie’s parents had lived for some years prior to her birth.

Rosemarie was educated at Miss Ironside’s School for Girls in Kensington, London. Her interest in the performing arts emerged at an early age. When she was seven years old, she took mime lessons with the legendary Russian prima ballerina Tamara Karsavina (1885-1978), who quickly spotted Rosemarie’s aptitude for dance. She recommended her to the Polish ballet master Stanislas Idzikowski (1894-1977), and it was under his tutelage that Rosemarie took the first steps towards her future career. While continuing to study at her day school, she furthered her dance training at the Royal Ballet School. She appeared in ballet and opera productions at Covent Garden and, in 1958, was given a role as Miriam in the film Drawn from the Nile. Having left the Royal Ballet School, Rosemarie became a ballet soloist and later a ballerina at the Basle State Ballet in Switzerland under the direction of Waslaw Orlikowsky. It was at around this time that she assumed her mother’s maiden name as her stage name.

While living and working in Switzerland, Rosemarie developed an interest in painting. She adopted expressionism and its vibrant use of strong colours as her dominant style. She returned to England to study painting at Saint Martin’s School of Art and at Morley College in London. To fund her studies, she continued dancing and took up fashion modelling aided by her mother, who drew fashion illustrations for the stores in Kensington and Knightsbridge. Rosemarie held her first exhibition at Clarges Gallery, London in February 1972. For the next thirty years, she exhibited her work widely in England and internationally in Sweden, Canada, and Brazil. In addition, she produced company logos, record sleeves, and stage designs, most notably sets and costumes for Dublin City Ballet’s productions.

Later in her artistic career, Rosemarie Cockayne combined her love of art with her deep interest in people and the environment. She began to do voluntary work with children, the homeless, and the disabled as Artist in Residence for several community groups, running art workshops and sitting at committees concerned with art and education. Among the charities she collaborated with were Field Lane, The Pembroke Centre, and Providence Row. Her work with the city’s charities was honoured in 2000 with the Freedom of the City of London.

Rosemarie Cockayne died after a long illness on 3 February 2015. Her funeral was held at the church of St John the Baptist in Kensington, and her ashes interred at the church of St John the Baptist in the parish of Cockayne Hatley in Bedfordshire alongside her parents.

Niamh Condron was born in Dublin in 1976 and gained a BA in Dance from the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, Leeds, in 1999. She has worked as a dancer with Scott Wells & Dancers Company (San Francisco), Justin Morrison (San Diego), Irish Modern Dance Theatre (Dublin), Sioned Hews Dance Company (Belgium), Earthfall Physical Theatre (Wales), The Curve Foundation (Scotland), and Dance Theatre of Ireland (Dublin). In 2001, Condron won a scholarship for emerging dance artists to train at the Impulstanz Festival, Vienna, and in the same year founded the This Torsion Dance Theatre to explore movement and performance, combining dance, music, and voice. Condron performs with the company at theatres, festivals, and alternative performance spaces in Ireland and abroad. In 2006, she founded the Vibrate Dance Festival and acted as its Artistic Director until 2008.

Joan Davis née Citron was born in Dublin in 1945. She studied tap, folk, and ballroom dancing with Evelyn Burchill as a child, and rediscovered her love of dance at the age of 29, when she began taking classes with the American modern dance pioneer Terez Nelson. Davis made her public debut as a contemporary dancer in 1975, when Nelson staged a small performance at St Mark’s Church in Dublin. Davis and Nelson later taught together, but their partnership failed to last, and Davis sought further training at the London School of Contemporary Dance, commuting between Dublin and London on a fortnightly basis to participate in intensive training sessions.

In April 1977, Davis co-founded the Dublin Contemporary Dance Studio with Karen Callaghan. The school was located at premises on Harold’s Cross, Dublin and opened its doors in September 1977. It provided an opportunity for dancers to work with guest teachers from abroad, and it was here that many of Ireland’s prominent dance personalities received their first grounding in contemporary dance. In March 1979, Davis and Callaghan established the Dublin Contemporary Dance Theatre under the patronage of Marsha Paludan and Niall Montgomery. The company toured professionally in Ireland and abroad and received financial support from the Arts Council. Its core members were Joan Davis, Robert Connor, Loretta Yurick, and Mary Nunan, but other dancers such as Ruth Way, Judy Cole, Paul Johnson, and Tony Pinder also performed in the company at different times. The dance company and school played a significant role in establishing and shaping contemporary dance in Ireland, and Davis is acknowledged as one of the pioneers in this field.

The Dublin Contemporary Dance Company folded suddenly in February 1989, when the Arts Council announced the withdrawal of its financial support. This gave Davis an opportunity to pursue her interest in movement as a therapeutic tool and to seek training in various somatic forms such as Authentic Movement and Body-Mind Centering. Throughout the 1990s, Davis worked as a movement therapist, advertising this work as The Moving Experience. She also explored the links between therapeutic practices and the arts, terming it The Theatre of the Unconscious. As part of this exploration, she organised outdoor retreats or “tribals” during which participants lived outdoors and created art and movement in nature. In 1999, Davis received funding from the Arts Council to explore therapeutic movement forms more fully in a shared dance context. The project culminated in a performance, Through Fluid Eyes, on Greystones Beach in County Wicklow in August of that year. From these explorations emerged the Maya Lila training method for professional dancers, which harnesses somatic training practices as a starting point for an exploration of the creative process and encourages coordination between body and mind.

Ernest de Regge was a major influence in the development of church music in Ennis and the diocese of Killaloe. He was an accomplished musician, organist and composer, and much of his music was performed by the Ennis Cathedral choir and broadcast on RTÉ. He was also instrumental in setting up the annual Church Music Festival, which was held in Ennis in the 1930s. Under the auspices of An tOireachtas, he arranged Irish melodies for school choirs and received many national and international awards for his work.

Ernest de Regge was born on 15 January 1901 in Overmere, Flanders, Belgium, where his father was an elementary school teacher and organist. Ernest’s musical talent was recognised at a young age and while still in elementary school he and his brother were given the opportunity of private classes under Jules De Groot, organist at the cathedral in Ghent. His secondary school in Sint Niklaas prepared him not only for teaching but also for the position of church organist. He then enrolled in the prestigious conservatory, the Lemmens Institute in Malines (currently incorporated into the University of Louvain), where he studied composition, organ and Gregorian music. In 1922, he received the degree of Licentiate in Music claiming first place in composition, while his classmate, the world famous Flor Peeters, took the prize for organ.

From 1900, the Lemmens Music Conservatory in Malines had sent its organists and musicians to Ireland. Ireland had musical people and good, well-maintained organs but lacked trained organists and musicians who could play them to the highest standard. There had been much sympathy in Ireland for Belgians suffering during the First World War, while the struggle for Irish independence had created much interest and sympathy on the continent. In 1923, Bishop Fogarty appointed Ernest de Regge music professor at St. Flannan’s College and organist-choirmaster in the Cathedral of SS Peter and Paul. The bishop’s aim was to implement the instruction of Pope Pius X to simplify choir music. In St. Flannan’s (a junior seminary), de Regge would be instructing future clergy of the diocese of Killaloe in musical literacy and giving them a firm grounding in Gregorian Chant.

In the 1920s and 1930s, de Regge returned frequently to Belgium to continue his studies under the distinguished teacher of harmony and orchestration, Paul Gilson of Liege (recipient of the prestigious Prix de Rome award). They were collaborating in 1942 on de Regge’s Piano Concerto when Paul Gilson died; it would appear that the work was never published. He also continued his studies in composition with Lodewijk Mortelmans, director of the Antwerp Music Conservatory.

The Ennis Cathedral choir had been associated with liturgy in the cathedral for over one hundred years, beginning in 1859 with another Belgian, Charles Louis ‘Mons’ Nono. In the cathedral, de Regge created a showpiece choir, which was the envy of other dioceses. The choir, which often had over a hundred members, was a focal point for the young people of Ennis. The highlights of the church calendar were the midnight mass and high mass at Christmas, Easter and St Patrick’s Day. Talented local singers received extensive training and in particular the voices of Eva Meehan (alto), Amby Costello (soprano), John Murphy and Aiden Tuttle (tenor), Stephen Touhy and George Meehan (bass) and Liam Walker (alto) were highlights of this era. Broadcasts on Radio Éireann included Sacred Concerts in 1930, 1933, 1935, 1946 (Diamond Jubilee of Bishop Fogarty), and 1947 (Mass in honour of Blessed Oliver Plunket), in addition to concerts such as the An Tostal in 1953.

In the early 1930s, the new Irish Republic was very anxious to acquire and publish new Irish music through the state publishing company, An Gum. De Regge and Micheál Ó Siochfhradha (a primary school inspector based in Ennis, a skilled violinist and a John McCormack Medal-winning tenor) took up that task. These two, together with Father Joseph Rogers, Irish professor at St Flannan’s and Sister Mary Albeus of the Sisters of Mercy worked for several years adapting old Irish airs for school choirs. O’Siochfhradha and de Regge also published a textbook The Rudiments of Music (1953) in both Irish and English on the teaching of music as a subject for secondary schools.

De Regge composed almost two hundred works for choirs of mixed voices, songs based upon English and Irish texts, masses, motets, piano and organ pieces. His profile grew as he won national competitions. He received the Composers Competition Milligan Fox medals in 1939, 1942 and 1946; Dr Annie Patterson Medals in 1943 and 1953 for composition; and first prizes in An tOireachtas Ceol in 1943, 1944, 1945, 1946, 1947 and 1956. It was, however, impossible to support his growing family as a music teacher and organist, and after entrepreneurial ventures into farming (chickens) and importing cars (Borgward and Lloyd), he opened a jewellery shop in O’Connell Street, Ennis and a music shop in Limerick. He combined his passion for collecting paintings and antiques with trips to the Dublin auction houses, where he bought pianos for refurbishing and resale.

The night before the fateful furniture auction at the historic Carmody’s Hotel in Ennis, de Regge quipped to his friend and choir manager Paddy Gill that he would buy de Valera’s bed for him (Paddy was not a Dev supporter). Next day, on 15 January, 1958, the floor of the auction room collapsed killing Ernest de Regge and seven others and injuring fourteen. The tragedy cast a shadow over the town for many months and years to come.

Ernest de Regge is remembered for his great musical talent, his continued and infectious good humour, his zeal and above all his kindness. He was a second father to his students and young choir members and always nurtured their talents; money was never a barrier to someone who had talent. He had special time for those who had to emigrate, perhaps remembering his own times in the twenties, and often took time to write to them to help them through those first lonely weeks, usually in England. Ernest de Regge had become an adopted son of Ennis, and as such had been taken to the town’s heart. He had left his mark on the musical and social life of so many in County Clare and farther afield.

Marguerite Donlon was born in 1966 in County Longford. Her early life was influenced by traditional Irish dance, and she did not begin her ballet studies until the age of 16. She received her training from Anica Dawson and Dorothy Stevens, and was a member of the English National Ballet under Peter Schaufuss. In 1990, she became a solo dancer and choreographer with the Deutsche Oper Berlin. She has worked with many celebrated artists, including Natalia Makarova, Rudolf Nureyev and Sir Kenneth MacMillan. In 2001, Donlon became director of the ballet at the Saarländisches Staatstheater in Saarbrücken, Germany. Her resident company, Donlon Dance Company, is renowned for the highly technical and artistic level of its dancers. They have presented not only Donlon’s choreographies but those of prominent artists such as Ji?í Kylián, Christian Spuck, Helena Waldmann and Rafael Bonachela. Donlon’s artistic and innovative style, which combines different art forms and humour, has been recognised through several awards and nominations. Donlon resigned her directorship in 2013 and was awarded a Medal of Merit for her outstanding work as ballet director and her contributions to the world of dance. Since 2014, Donlon has brought her creativity and coaching skills to the world of business as a business coach and leadership mentor.

Tiede Herrema was born on 21 April 1921 in Utrecht, Holland. He graduated in mechanical engineering in 1945 and gained a bachelor’s degree in industrial psychology in 1951. He continued his studies in psychology and sociology and gained a PhD in 1959, his dissertation dealing with the rehabilitation of disabled people. He married in 1948 Engelina Elizabeth Borren and the couple had four sons. Herrema’s distinguished career in industry spanned 37 years (1946-1983) and covered all aspects, including production management, general management and industrial relations. In 1973, Herrema was appointed managing director of Ferenka Ltd., and in September of that year he moved to Ireland with his wife Elizabeth and their two youngest sons to take up a position in the newly constructed cord manufacturing plant at Annacotty. Two years later, on the morning of 3 October, Herrema was abducted on his way to work by IRA leader Eddie Gallagher and his accomplices Marion Coyle, Brian McGowan and John Vincent Walsh. The objective of the abduction was to secure the release of three republican prisoners, including Dr Rose Dugdale, by whom Gallagher had a son. Herrema’s status as manager of a large multi-national corporation was hoped to bring international pressure on the government to yield to the demands.

For the next two and a half weeks, Herrema and his captors moved from location to location, and their whereabouts remained unknown until 21 October, when Herrema, Gallagher and Coyle were traced to a house in St Evin’s Park, Monasterevin, County Kildare. On the evening of 7 November, after prolonged negotiations directed by Chief Superintendent Laurence Wren, during which a minimum amount of food was allowed into the house, the kidnappers surrendered and Herrema was released after 36 days in captivity. He was later to attribute his survival to his strong physical fitness and his concerted efforts to befriend his captors to make it harder for them to kill him.

In the trials that followed the abduction, Marion Coyle was sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment in Limerick Prison, while Eddie Gallagher received twenty years in Portlaoise Prison. For their courage and dignity, Herrema and his wife were honoured by Irish authorities with the honorary citizenship of Ireland and Freedom of Limerick in December 1975. In Holland, Herrema was voted Dutchman of the Year in 1975, and granted an officership of the Order of Orange Nassau by Queen Juliana in 1977.

Following a holiday in the Bahamas to recover from his ordeal, Herrema returned to his job in Ferenka, but in early 1976 was appointed Personnel Director of AKZO and returned to Holland. He later specialised in crisis management and worked in that capacity for Thomassen International, Lijnco Groningen, Silenka, and Radio Veronica. He also became a much sought-after speaker and adviser to the police and multinational companies in hostage preparedness and prevention. His humanitarian interests led to his appointment in 1984 as Director General of the Dutch Red Cross. In the meantime in Limerick, Ferenka Ltd., which throughout its existence had a poor record of industrial relations, was shut down in 1979, with losses of over 1,400 jobs.

Although Herrema and his wife returned to Holland, they never lost their love for Ireland and the Irish people and became regular and popular visitors to the country. Herrema campaigned for an early release of Marion Coyle and Eddie Gallagher, but the release was not granted and both prisoners served full term. Coyle was released in 1985, and Gallagher in 1990. Herrema felt no bitterness towards his captors and expressed a willingness to meet both following their release, but only if requested by Coyle and Gallagher. However, no such request was forthcoming and, in spite of attempts by journalists, the three never met again.

The kidnapping and the trials that followed caused an international media storm, which threw Herrema into the public arena and made him a celebrity for the rest of his life. He later joked that he could never forget his abduction because he was never allowed to forget it. Tiede Herrema died on 24 April 2020, a few days after his 99th birthday and just two days after the death of his wife.