OnTheTown: A flock of exotic-looking birds, a number of purple orcs and some chocolate hearts gathered on St Valentine's Night at Dublin's RHA Gallery to hear details of the upcoming St Patrick's Festival.
"We have created our own legend," said Kareen Pennefather, director of the City Fusion Project, which comprises 16 multicultural community groups who will take part in the parade this year. Dilman Ahmedi, from Kurdistan, and Eloho Egwuterai, from Nigeria, stood nearby, dressed as the strange-looking birds. "These birds symbolise the feeling of arriving in a new place, being like a flock of birds," Pennefather added.
It is estimated that the festival, which has a budget of more than €2 million, is worth €58 million to the economy, said Mary Davis, the festival's chairwoman.
"I see it as a family event," she said. "I see it as a great contribution of different aspects of Irish life coming together to make it a success."
"It's just grown in leaps and bounds," said Tania Banotti, chief executive of Theatre Forum. "It's much more multicultural now."
"When I was a kid in Athy, all it was about was the drowned shamrock . . . Now it's such a celebration of where we stand in the world," said producer Bill Hughes.
Dancer and choreographer Joe Conlan recalled watching the parade as a child in Dublin city centre. "It's bigger and better now," he said.
"It shows the vibrancy of Ireland," said Olive Braiden, chair of the Arts Council. Mary McCarthy, arts director at the Dublin Docklands Development Authority, nodded in agreement and recalled the days when St Patrick's Day was the day in Lent when you could break your fast.
"It's still the same down the country, with the floats and the marching bands. It's still better down the country," said Noeleen McGovern, from Virginia, Co Cavan. But her friends, Mary Finlay, from Dublin's Churchtown, and Aidan Lynch, from Kells, Co Meath, were not convinced.
[ info@stpatricksfestival.ie ]
Lines to lend your ears to
'Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears," cried Aidan Kelly in his role as Mark Antony, while the body of Julius Caesar, played by Robert O'Mahoney, lay on a bier at his feet.
The opening-night audience at Julius Caesar, in the Abbey Theatre this week, waited in the dark for the great Shakespearean tragedy to unfold and for the familiar lines to be spoken.
"You get lost in it forever . . . You keep finding things in it," said the play's director, Jason Byrne. "It's full of ambiguities, contradictions, complex psychology."
"The genius about Shakespeare is that when it's produced well, it has a contemporary resonance. You don't have to look too deep to find political overtones," said Fiach Mac Conghail, director of the Abbey Theatre.
Julius Caesar is "about the fact that at every stage we should find everyone's argument convincing. Who do you trust and why?" said Karen Fricker, researcher at TCD's Institute of International Integration Studies.
Among those at the opening night were actors Cathy Belton, who is off to Tokyo shortly with Druid's production of The Playboy of the Western World; singer Susannah de Wrixon, who will soon be doing a show at the Iridium Jazz Club on Broadway in New York; and Anne Clarke, whose Landmark Productions company is currently staging Blackbird, by David Harrower, at the Project.
Others at the opening included actors Geraldine Plunkett, Rosaleen Linehan, Fergal McElherron and Mark O'Regan, artist James Hanley RHA, Wolfgang Hoffmann, director of the Dublin Fringe Festival, and playwrights Tom Murphy and Bernard Farrell.
Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare, runs at the Abbey Theatre until Sat, Mar 17
Poet on a salvage mission
Poets, priests and parishioners all trooped in to Damer Hall on Dublin's St Stephen's Green to hear Pádraig J Daly read from his latest collection of poems, Clinging to the Myth, this week. He writes poems of "simplicity, directness, depth and a very acceptable poetic rhythm", said fellow poet and former publisher John F Deane. "The poems have very deceptive musical patterns."
"He writes very well about rural Ireland . . . and there's a spiritual dimension to his poetry, which is unusual," said poet and Galway writer-in-residence Micheal O'Loughlin, adding: "He has an authentic voice. He manages to draw together the Christian and the secular. . . I don't really see him as a priest poet."
Daly, an Augustinian who is parish priest of Ballyboden in Dublin 16, grew up in Dungarvan, Co Waterford. He read a selection of work at the launch, including poems about his mother (and one about his father), summers in the Gaeltacht as a child, the presence of sin in the midst of good things, and events in an Arab community in northern Nigeria.
Daly is conscious of an emerging post-Christian Ireland and looks for "ways to hold to the old patterns and traditions in a changing world, clinging as a shipwrecked sailor might cling to his vessel", according to Dedalus publisher Pat Boran. "He is also clinging to the myth as a means to save it, to rescue it, the way an adult might cling to a child in difficulty."
Among those at the reading were Sr Gonzaga Clancy, former principal of the Coombe's Holy Faith Secondary School in Dublin 8; retired teacher Olive Mullen; writer Dardis Clarke; Fr Paddy O'Reilly, of Ballyboden Parish; Fr Tommy McManus, of Dublin's Meath Street Parish; and the poet's brother, Micheal Daly, and his first cousin, Michael Steele.
Clinging to the Myth, by Pádraig J Daly, is published by Dedalus Press
Tribute to an artist paying tribute
Sixteen paintings by Louis Le Brocquy, alongside some of the masters who influenced him, such as Degas and Manet, went on view at the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane this week.
Southern Window, painted by Le Brocquy in 1939 in his studio in the south of France, "was an auspicious beginning for the self-taught artist who would go on to contribute significantly to the identity of Irish modern art", said Barbara Dawson, the Hugh Lane's director.
The painting "reveals his heightened awareness of the prevailing modern movements", she added. "Since then, the gallery has been collecting works from each period of his output and is fortunate to have a representative collection of work by this great artist."
The show includes eight of the artist's most recent works which have never been shown in Ireland before.
The show "is a great tribute to Louis and we should all be very proud today", said Eoin McGonigal SC, chairman of the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
"It's lovely that those artists - Degas and Manet - that he's admired are placed side by side with his work. That's very refreshing," said art critic Hilary Pyle. "And I'm so glad to see so much of the early work. One sees it in fits and starts but we've got it here beautifully hung."
Among those who came to the opening were Nobel literature laureate Seamus Heaney and his wife, Marie; Cllr Vincent Jackson, the Lord Mayor of Dublin, who recently bestowed the Freedom of the City on the 91-year-old artist; Dr Michael Ryan, director of the Chester Beatty Library, which has loaned work by Japanese masters Utamaro and Toyokuni to the show; and Conor Nolan, curator of Greyfriars Arts Gallery in Waterford, which has loaned Le Brocquy's painting, Belfast Refugees (1941), to the exhibition.
The artist and his wife, artist Anne Madden, and their two sons, Alexis and Pierre (the latter of whom curated the show with the assistance of Jessica O'Donnell, the gallery's acting head of collections), were all in attendance at the opening.
Louis Le Brocquy and his Masters: Early Heroes, Later Homage continues at the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane until Fri, Mar 30