Magill People - December 1978
Maureen Concannon O'Brien is the founder of the English Language Instiitute at 99 St. Stephen's Green. She came to Ireland in the late 50s to study in UCD, where she received a BA and Masters Degree in English, as well as a diploma in Psychoology.
When Maureen worked in the Careers Office at UCD she saw the need for a language school in Dublin. Students used to call into the office looking for English classes, which were not available on a short-term basis.
The English Language Institute is the largest College of its type in Ireland and since its establishment in 1961, about 40,000 students have enrolled in it.
In the New Year Maureen is off to the Soviet Union at the invitation of the Moscow Pedagogical Institute for Lannguages. There she will observe new techniques for the teachhing of languages.
Maureen is now completting a two-year Research Proogramme on foreign opinion of the Irish. She has interviewed 60,000 foreigners and financced the study. The results are expected shortly after Christtmas and Maureen feels a lot of people will be very surprissed at the outcome.
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Hugh Leonard's best joke in years is the publication of an anthology of his humour columns published by John Feeney of Egotist Press.
Leonard has had a record 1978. For his l)a seen in New York, he won the best playwright of the year, and he has already sold the film 1-<'. rights to Hollywood, thus ennsuring a million dollars from a single play. As well as his success with Da, another of h'is plays, Summer, is set for production in Boston next month.
P.S. And another joke: as an artist, Leonard gets all this money tax free!
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Popular tunes are regularly used in TV commercials, but a reverse situation arose recently with music compossed by Shaun Davey fOT radio' and TV butter commercial. Public i,nterest in this music prompted the National Dairy Council to commission Shaun Davey to write a three minute version of his composition, which is now released by CBS records, entitled Pride of the Herd. The flip side features Night Flight. Shaun Davey is well known for his music, composed for Stewart Parker's I Pia, y Catchpenny Twist, later 'I used for BBC TV's Play For Today.
The butter music has a haunting, plaintive melody, evocative of our cultural heriitage. The sleeve of the record consists of an eight-page illuustrated history of the Two Thousand Year Tradition of Buttermaking in Ireland. We are told "it is the soft Irish rain and mists combined with a mild temperature that makes butter and the Celtic Gold of Ireland". The imporrtance of butter to the Irish through the centuries is recorrded with ancedotes of the ritual of making it - the song of the milkmaid rap: "Come, come contents of the churn, come dear butter to my waist and butter to my elbow.".