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Michael Flatley
Michael Flatley learned his first dance steps from his grandmother Hannah Ryan at the early age of four: and the empty front seat at his shows was a memorial to this revered but departed figure. By the age of 17, he had become the first American to win the World Irish Dance Championship as well as being named All Ireland Flute Champion and winning a golden Gloves award for boxing.
It was during a period as the dance act with the traditional musical group The Chieftains that Michael Flatley vitalised Irish dance, unleashing arms that had once been rigid.
His defining moment came in the Point Theatre, Dublin 1994, when he was commissioned to provide the interval performance - a passionate and shrewd blending of flamenco and the Hollywood musical. This marriage of the archaic and the avant-garde made him and his partner Jean Butler the first international stars of Irish dance. The full-length show called Riverdance won huge acclaim in Dublin and London in the next year.
Subsequently, Michael Flatley devised Lord of the Dance which broke all attendance records at Wembley arena and at Radio City Music Hall. In March 2000 he was named Irish-American of the year and his art was acclaimed by Nelson Mandela. By then Lord of the Dance had sold over $500million worth of tickets worldwide. His more recent show Feet of Flames has been seen by millions in Europe from Budapest to Belfast. By the time of his retirement from the stage, he had achieved the feat of executing 35 foot-taps per second. His life is a parable of how in staying true to ethnic roots, Irish-Americans learned how to make an art form that was revived in the 1980's go global in the 1990's and in demonstrating the link between cultural self- belief and commercial success, Mr Flatley has not forgotten the less fortunate, investing in many charities both here and in the US. He is a dreamer who knows how to make wishes come true and in the fullest sense of the term an Irish revivalist.
Imogen Stuart
Imogen Stuart is one of our best known artists, with work on display at Stillorgan Shopping Centre and here at UCD. Born in Germany in 1927, she became a student of the expressionist sculptor, Otto Hitzberger in carving, relief and work in wood and stone. In 1949 she visited Ireland with Ian Stuart, the man she would marry, becoming fascinated by Celtic Saints such as Kevin and Brigid and by their mystical understanding of the natural world. She converted to Catholicism and after marriage in 1951 lived in Laragh Castle near Glendalough.
She is most famous for her work in Cathedrals such as Armagh, Galway and Longford as well as for churches by the architect Liam McCormack. Her 'Stations of the Cross' at Ballintubber are rightly admired, as is the bronze of Pope John Paul II in St. Patrick's College Maynooth. She was named Professor of Sculpture by the Royal Hibernian Academy in 2000.
It is the happy destiny of the sculptor to produce an artwork which is never separated from daily life but is part of our built environment. In a long illustrious career Imogen Stuart has produced beautiful objects which strengthen the human spirit and make people feel more at home with themselves and their setting.
But she also makes things for her own pleasure; and an exhibition at the Solomon Gallery presented the work of a quarter century from 1977 to 2002.
Eithne Healy
Over the past two decades in Ireland, an astonishing number of artistic enterprises have been founded, often involving the young; and these can now be seen to have provided the necessary cultural backdrop to the more general material prosperity of the land. No activist better symbolises that revival than Eithne Healy.
In her early career she worked as an air hostess and later as a specialist teacher of speech and drama. It was this latter activity which led her to become in 1983 a founder and chair of the National Youth Theatre, providing outlets for talented actors and directors at a time of widespread unemployment and frustration among talented youth. This was, it must be remembered, the period when there were thousands of garage bands rehearsing around the country and when Professors regularly wrote references for honours graduates to take up posts as packers in local supermarkets.
By 1985 Eithne Healy became a board member of Team Theatre in Education, a gifted and idealistic group who brought drama into schools and communities, offering many children their first experience of the magic of theatre. Not only that, but Team also honed the talents of some of today's foremost film and drama directors.
One year later in 1986 Eithne Healy became chair and board member of Opera Theatre Company, another initiative that helped to demystify the form of opera and bring lesser-known works, performed mainly by Irish singers, to an audience which might otherwise never have experienced them.
Throughout these years Eithne Healy served as a board member of the Dublin Theatre Festival and for three years as chair. It was during her tenure that many young, new talents came to the fore.
In 1988 she became involved with COTHÚ, an interface between the world of business and the arts and subsequently she was drawn in to the work of the Royal Hibernian Academy, the Arts Council, Temple Bar Properties and the National Museum. She is a practical patriot in the fullest sense of that term, having served also on the Government's Millennium Committee and on the Centenary Celebration of James Joyce. From 2000 to the present she has also chaired the Board of the Abbey Theatre.
Anne Madden
For an art which is at once securely Irish and profoundly international, original but for that very reason forever engaged in a return to origins, the university honours Anne Madden.
Born in London in 1932, Anne Madden spent the early years of childhood in Chile. Later her family lived in Ireland and London, where she trained at the Chelsea School of Arts and Crafts. In her youth she exchanged paintings and ideas with American abstract expressionists. Her techniques included palette knife and paint flows. Much of her early work celebrated the Burren region of County Clare by a method called pouring painting, which captured the limestone rock and disappearing rivers of that beautiful region.
In London she met the painter Louis le Broquy and they married and set up home and studio in the village of Carros in the south of France. In 1965 her work was chosen to represent Ireland at the Paris Biennale. After 1970 she painted a notable series of vertical studies, each of human scale, as homage to those megalithic monuments which had moved her during that part of her childhood spent in Clare. In 1980 she gave up painting for a while and created a new series called Openings, combining graphite and oil paint on paper. Thereafter she returned to canvas paintings.
One of her most famous recent works is titled Empyrius and hangs in permanent installation from the large vaulted ceiling of Carros medieval castle having been commissioned by the villagers. An example of her work also hangs as one of ten commissioned paintings displayed here in the Aula Maxima of UCD.
Humanitarian action and philanthropy
Christina Noble
Christina Noble is the founder and driving force behind the Christina Noble Children's Foundation, an international partnership of people dedicated to serving children in need in Vietnam and Mongolia. In Vietnam the foundation has established more than 40 educational and medical projects assisting over 150,000 of the country's poorest and most vulnerable children and their families. In Mongolia, the foundation provides education and medical and social support for thousands of children. Christina has received many honours for the tireless humanitarian work, including an OBE.
Christina Noble was motivated to pursue her humanitarian mission by her own experiences as a very deprived child growing up in Dublin. Arriving in Vietnam in 1989, she decided that it was her destiny to work with the children she saw there who were living as she had lived long ago in Dublin. Her first breakthrough was in securing financial support from a UK owned oil company and then she managed to receive official recognition from the Minister of Labour and Social Services. This led to the opening of the Children's Social and Medical Centre in Ho Chi Minh City in 1991 which was later replicated in many other parts of Vietnam and later in Mongolia.
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