Search Results for 'Grand Croix of the Légion d'honneur'

This week marked the quiet passing of the 70th anniversary of the historic role played by a lighthouse keeper in Blacksod, who unwittingly changed the course of World War II when he delivered a weather forecast all the way to General Dwight D Eisenhower on June 3, 1944.

Award-winning Irish pianist, Maria McGarry, from Ballyhaunis, will launch her first solo CD album, 20th Century Piano Masterworks this Sunday, January 15 at the Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, Dublin. The CD, to be released on the Seven Cedars Music label, is a collection of early 20th century European piano repertoire by the composers Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, Enrique Granados, and Olivier Messiaen.

I was very impressed at the dignity and solemnity at the funeral of Otto von Hapsburg who died aged 94 years on July 4. Twelve days later he was entombed in the Imperial crypt of St Stephen's Cathedral, Vienna, with some pomp and ceremony; but his actual ‘ Three Knock’ burial was simplicity itself.

Not for the first time the small village of Newport became a hive of activity because of a visit from the royal family of Monaco. On Wednesday, following in the footsteps of his late mother and father, Prince Albert of Monaco visited the ancestral home of his late mother, Princess Grace, in the west of the county.

ENGLAND’S GEORGE VI suffered from a speech impediment and found himself king after his brother had unexpectedly abdicated.

The suggestion by French President Nicolas Sarkozy that the Irish would have to vote on again on Lisbon has met with an angry response in Ireland and left many questioning the EU’s commitment to democracy.

Is the world in the grip of a new Cold War? Should we fear Russia again as we did in the 1970s and 1980s? Many would think so given the growing unease in the Western world of a resurgent Russia under the former president and now prime minister Vladimir Putin.

Nobel Peace prize winner and Holocaust survivor Professor Elie Wiesel will deliver an address via video link at NUI Galway next Wednesday at 7pm.

OLIVIER MESSIAEN considered himself an ornithologist as well as a composer. Not only did he write innovative modern classical music, he also transcribed birdsong and believed birds were the greatest musicians of all.

Tom Cullivan, one of Ireland’s finest classical composers, and a long-term resident of Furbo, recently premièred his piano piece ‘Fáilte Uí Cheallaigh’ for Prince Albert II of Monaco.