Katy French started out as an ambitious model, but her hunger for publicity made her a national figure, writes Róisín Ingle
Journalists who had never met model Katy French were mystified when an invitation to her 24th birthday party arrived in the post last week.
It was pink, decorated with butterflies and flowers and inside there were cute pictures of French as a child. In one of the childhood snaps she strikes a model pose. "Join Katy. . . for the party of the season," read the invitation, which was sent to a horde of media types, models and celebrities, some of whom she knew and some she did not.
Four days later she was rushed to hospital from a house party in Ashbourne, Co Meath, to Our Lady's Hospital in Navan where she remained in a critical condition last night.
Her admission to hospital was covered by RTÉ's Morning Ireland on Monday morning but for some listening when the news broke, the response was "Katy who?"
If you don't read certain newspapers, or watch certain TV programmes, her existence may well have passed you by. And yet these past 11 months have been the busiest of this ambitious young woman's career. Bright, photogenic and publicity ravenous, her profile has increased steadily with each lingerie shoot, product launch and goose-pimple-inducing photo opportunity in St Stephen's Green.
The Co Wicklow woman is one of a slew of models used by Dublin City Council to launch everything from eco-cabs to fairtrade fortnight, a practice which sparked a row among councillors. French has since gone on to bigger things.
There was a successful trip to Calcutta for John O'Shea's Goal, a slot on The Late Late Show gamely handling creepy-crawlies for charity and a brief stint on RTÉ's fundraising reality TV effort, Celebrities Go Wild.
In the past year she has become Ireland's answer to Britain's ultimate glamour girl and now one-woman industry, Jordan, aka Katie Price. Like Jordan, French has no qualms about posing in her underwear. Like Jordan, she is always ready with frank opinions on everything from abortion to sex toys to cocaine. Unlike Jordan, she is not a multimillionaire.
Still, French, with her birthday party that doubled as a networking media event, is the pouting personification of a Jordanesque variation on Irish celebrity which crystallised this year.
It was the break-up of her engagement last January which propelled her on to the front pages of tabloid newspapers. In a "you couldn't make it up" scenario, her fiancé, Marcus Sweeney, broke up with her after walking in on a lingerie shoot which featured French reclining half-naked on a table in his Dublin restaurant.
He was apparently upset by the fact that his girlfriend, a lingerie model, was posing for photographers in her underwear. More recently she was grilled at length in Hot Press magazine where she was quoted on her pro-choice views. French herself suggested that it was negative public reaction to those views which may have led to her being the first participant voted off RTÉ's Celebrities Go Wild.
But it was her recent comments in Hot Press about drugs that received most attention. In the interview, she claimed never to have taken drugs and said those who did so were "vulgar".
A few days later, in an interview with a Sunday newspaper, she changed her story, saying she had been taking cocaine since she was 19 but that she didn't do drugs any more.
"I first tried it when I was 19 and soon realised that it was very much part of the Dublin social scene," she said. "Cocaine is everywhere but I just wanted to say that it's not cool, it's not attractive. I am speaking out because I feel we need to be more honest with ourselves, stop living in denial and take responsibility. When you are doing coke the highs are great, but the lows are very, very low."
There aren't many of us who would relish the stupid mistakes and embarrassing escapades of our early 20s being picked over and dissected in the national media but that's exactly what has happened to French this year.
While she was herself the chief instigator of many of these revelations, it did not justify the cruel criticisms of her, particularly on the internet which were understood to be a source of pain for the model.