Eilís Mullan For 30 years Eilís Mullan, who died early on Thursday morning, was a much-loved and dynamic force on the Dublin arts scene, and a hugely inspirational figure in youth drama.
Born in 1936, she returned to UCD in the late 1960s as a mature student to take a BA in English and economics. Afterwards she worked for some years in the Department of Agriculture in UCD.
During this time she was invited by her long-time collaborator and friend, Paddy O'Dwyer, to be artistic director of Dublin Youth Theatre.
Her work and influence there are legendary among many professional actors who were inspired by her direction and encouragement at an early point in their careers.
They include Peter Hanly, Aidan Gillen, Andrew Connolly, Jasmine Russell, Finnualla Murphy, Eanna MacLiam, Fiana Toibín, Veronica Coburn, Deirdre Molloy, Jason Barry, David Parnell, Joe Hanley, Anthony Brophy, Pat Nolan, Anto Nolan, Clelia Murphy and David Wilmot.
In the early 1990s she took up a full-time post as director of the National Association of Youth Drama, where she promoted and oversaw a huge growth in that area. When she started her work with NAYD there were fewer than 20 youth theatre groups in the country. When she retired a year ago that number had swelled to 74.
She commissioned and produced new work for youth theatres by Peter Sheridan and Antoine O Flaharta. She directed Gerard Stembridge's first play. Constantly looking to encourage new talent, in 1995 she organised the young playwright competition for NAYD, which brought Mark O'Rowe to public attention for the first time.
Those who worked with her on productions constantly refer to two key characteristics: unfinished sentences accompanied by extravagant arm-waving combined with a rare instinct for what lay at the unspoken heart of a play or a performance.
Her two other literary loves were James Joyce and Shakespeare. She was for a time president of the Dublin Shakespeare Society, for which she directed many productions, including Macbeth, King Lear, Pericles and Twelfth Night at Castletown House, as well as a production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead featuring the rather unusual lead casting of the very young Gabriel Byrne and Myles Dungan.
She directed a number of imaginative Joycean adaptations in the days when, to quote Myles Na gCopaleen "it was neither profitable nor popular".
Dear Dirty Dublin was a thoughtful and hilarious thematic piece drawn from Dubliners, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.
There were large-cast performances of the entire Cyclops and Sirens chapters, and a magnificent "in situ" production of The Dead in the James Joyce Centre is long remembered by all who saw it.
Friends spoke of her inexorable powers of persuasion, her subtle intelligence, her love of good company, drinking and talking into the night.
But most of all they returned again and again to her extraordinary generosity of spirit, her enthusiastic promotion of young talent and new ideas. She was an inspirational figure for so many theatre people.
Born and raised in Rathgar the eldest of three girls and three boys, Eilís Mullan had lived in Portobello for the last 15 years, a home she shared with her eldest niece, Ruth.
She is survived by her sister Dympna, and her brothers Kevin and Eamonn.
It is typical of her, as a Dublin woman of proud radical beliefs, that one of her final actions was her determination, despite her illness, to come out of hospital for the last time on polling day and register her vote.
Eilís Mullan: born 1936; died June 24th, 2004