It may take Aubrey McCarthy, who secured the final Seanad seat in the Trinity College Dublin constituency panel last week, some time to get used to the upper house. After all, he’s more used to spending time in the big house.
The founder of drugs rehabilitation charity Tiglin has frequented prisons over the years to meet inmates with addiction issues and it was on one such visit to Mountjoy’s women’s wing, the Dóchas Centre, that he befriended one of Ireland’s most notorious murderers, the late Catherine Nevin.
After Nevin’s death from cancer in 2018, he revealed how he had struck up an unlikely friendship with the so-called Black Widow while she was serving a life sentence for murdering her husband Tom Nevin at the couple’s Wicklow pub, Jack White’s Inn.
Nevin had been impressed with McCarthy’s work with women prisoners addicted to drugs. “She began to telephone me regularly and write letters,” he said in an interview on RTÉ not long after Nevin’s death.
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Through McCarthy, she became interested in a career in counselling and enrolled on a course in addiction studies at Ballyfermot College but was unable to complete it because of illness.
[ Catherine Nevin: The trial and conviction of the 'Black Widow'Opens in new window ]
After being released on compassionate grounds in 2017 following her cancer diagnosis, she visited McCarthy in Tiglin. He visited her again in a Dublin hospice before she died, saying she was still “flirtatious” on her death bed.
“I arrived in and she was lying in the bed. She had her nails all painted, her hair in a ponytail. Even to the very end she was very, very conscious of her appearance,” he said.
McCarthy’s work rehabilitating prisoners such as Nevin should stand him in good stead in the Seanad, another place populated by the institutionalised.
Ex-minister’s RTÉ book delayed
Shane Ross’s forthcoming book on the RTÉ payments scandal, Den of Inequity, promises a story of “corruption, waste and ineptitude” at the national broadcaster.
But we will have to wait a little longer to find out from the former minister for transport how RTÉ got itself into a “horrible mess and also what the future might hold for this formerly beloved institution”.
The book, published by Atlantic Books, was originally due out early next month but publication has now been pushed back until September 4th – more than two years since the Ryan Tubridy payments scandal story first broke.
He may have to jog our memories over what it was all about by then.
Ex-hooker’s country house plan gets red card
Former Ireland hooker Bernard Jackman has been blindsided by Wicklow County Council. The rugby analyst, who plied his trade for Connacht and Leinster in his playing days, comes from rural Tullow on the Carlow-Wicklow border, an unlikely rugby stronghold that also produced flanker Seán O’Brien.
Last year Jackman applied for planning permission to build a two-storey, four-bedroom house beside the family farm, stating in his planning application that he regularly works on the farm and intends to take it over in the near future.
But the council’s ever-vigilant planners have deemed him not to be someone with “a bona fide need for a new dwelling in the open countryside”.
Jackman was also denied permission to retain a mobile home and kennels for his dogs on the site, pending planning permission for the house. The council ruled that allowing the mobile home and kennels would set an “undesirable precedent” and would be “seriously injurious” to the setting. Harsh on the dogs.
‘Mr Moonlight’ witness avoids court
Mary Lowry, who appeared as a witness in the high-profile Mr Moonlight love triangle case in 2019, has avoided another court outing.
The Tipperary woman, now 58, was given a one-year suspended sentence last year after admitting a charge of careless driving causing death in 2021. In the incident, Lowry crashed into father of five Patrick Connolly as she turned on to the N24 Waterford-to-Limerick Road.
Connolly had been riding a motorcycle with his 15-year-old son a pillion passenger. A personal injuries case taken by the boy’s mother, on his behalf, was due in court in Dublin last week but was settled for an undisclosed amount on Wednesday.
Keith Duffy case due back in court
Keith Duffy speaks in the new documentary, Boyzone: No Matter What, about being treated like a puppet by former manager Louis Walsh.
The singer and actor is clearly no walkover any more. In December he secured a High Court injunction against a company called Medica Stem Cells which treated him for knee pain last year.
The company, which uses regenerative stem cell therapy, featured a testimonial by Duffy on its social media afterwards. But then Duffy noticed that it was using his image prominently on billboards across the country to promote its treatments without his permission.
His case will be back in court next week where he is claiming the company, which did not respond to queries, used his image without permission. He wants it to desist and pay compensation.
Guess who backed that Irish ‘DEI musical’
What was White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on about last week when she criticised a $70,000 grant by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) for a “DEI musical” in Ireland?
Levitt labelled the funding, earmarked for diversity and equality projects, as an example of the “wasteful spending of American taxpayer dollars”.
It turns out the money was for a performance by Philip King’s Other Voices at the US embassy in 2022 entitled Other Voices: Dignity – Towards a More Equitable Future. (King declined to comment when contacted by Irish Times reporters this week.)
The event, held in the US ambassador’s residence and featuring performances from Loah, Rhiannon Giddens, Francesco Turrisi and Mick Flannery, turns out to have been funded by USAID and Rethink Ireland, an NGO that distributes funding to support social innovation.
Rethink Ireland’s backers include the Irish Government, which matches donations made by the private sector. Private backers have included many of the biggest US multinationals in Ireland in recent years, including Salesforce, Google and, er, Elon Musk’s X. Yes, the man who has vowed to close down USAID.
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