Mary o neill biography
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In the closest race of the election, O'Neill defeatedBracko by 16 votes. She was a pupil of the Dominican Convent in Eccles Street, Dublin where her family moved after the death of her father, a RIC sub-constable in Loughrea. Two of her plays were performed by Austin Clarke's Lyric Theatre Company.
Background
Mary Devenport was born in Loughrea, County Galway, Ireland in 1879.
Devenport engaged in lengthy correspondence with Clarke from 1929-48 concerning the production of her work and combining choreography with verse for these productions.
Bluebeard, a ballet based on her play, was choreographed by Ninette de Valois as one of the final productions of the Abbey school of ballet. The Act was passed by the legislature, but was struck down as contravening the Charter of Rights and Freedoms by the AlbertaCourt of Queen's Bench two years later.
Quick-witted, intellectual and in tune with Irish modernism as well as the Celtic revival, many of her ideas incorporated both new Western understandings of the human psyche and the ancient Eastern doctrine of karma. Through these documents it is at last possible to see a woman of formidable literary ability and artistic talent.
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During the 1920s she would often take afternoon tea with W.B.Yeats, and many of her evenings were spent swooning in near-asphyxiation from the fumes of Æ’s pipe. Often inadvertently disparaging, these accounts refer to her as wife of highly ranking civil servant who socialised with Dublin’s political and cultural elite.
Mary O'Neill
poet
Mary Devenport O'Neill was an Irish poet and dramatist and a friend and colleague of W. B. Yeats, George Russell,and Austin Clarke. Her collection, Prometheus and Other Poems, was the first collection of poetry published by an Irish poet, besides Yeats, which could be considered modernist.
Education
From 1898-1903 she studied teaching at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art (the present-day National College of Art, Dublin).
Career
She published three verse plays,Bluebeard (1933), Cain(1945) and Out of The Darkness (1947). She taught in both public and private schools.
This website brings together, for the first time, her collected work, a public archive of her letters and her biography. Accounts tell of her championing the work of French poet Charles Péguy or Marcel Proust. O'Neill also served as a member of one of the RalphKlein government's "truth squads", formed to defend the government's highlycontroversialHealth Care Protection Act.
She chaired the 2000 Fees and ChargesReview Committee, which made recommendations on a wide variety of government-assessed fees.
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on July 23, 2013
Mary Devenport O’Neill alongside her husband, Joseph O’Neill
A Galway convent girl alone in 1890s Dublin, Mary Devenport O’Neill went on to establish herself as a writer and one of the literati of the Irish Free State.
Her name is sometimes misspelt or repeated incidentally in stories about other personalities of this era. Devenport had a reputation as a psychic. In a rematchduring the 2001 election, O'Neill increased her lead over Bracko to more than two thousandvotes in her successful bid for re-election.
In office, O'Neill was best known for sponsoring the SchoolTrusteeStatutesAmendment Act, 2002, whichproposed to prohibitteachers from serving as schooltrusteesanywhere in the province.
Afterretiring from teaching, she worked as a realtor and served as a schooltrustee with the Greater St. AlbertCatholic Schools.
In the 1997 provincial election, O'Neill was the ProgressiveConservativecandidate in the riding of St. Albert, where she facedLiberalincumbent Len Bracko. In the ‘30s she would hop onto a tram from Rathgar into town for a chat with Sybil le Brocquy and spend days in her Kenilworth Square drawing room plotting movement directions for Ninette de Valois amidst snatches of Debussy’s “Prelude à l’apres midi d’un faune.” She was a salon hostess, artist, poet, playwright and novelist’s wife, who glitters and yet remains half-seen.
When she was fifty, she published a collection of poetry Prometheus and Other Poems (London: Jonathan Cape 1929) which comprises thirty-three lyric poems, four "dream poems", one long poem, and a verse-play.
She published regularly in The Dublin Magazine and contributed reviews to The Bell and The Irish Times.
She and her husband were self-styled as European Irish. Her final play War, The Monster was performed by the Abbey Experimental Theatre Company in 1949 but was not published.