People of Year - September

The year in people: September

Peter Canavan Tyrone's cameo star

The sporting narrative will always be written as a series of pivotal moments. For all the consistent excellence of Conor Gormley, Ryan McMenamin and Stephen O'Neill, Tyrone's season almost boiled down to two moments of pure, grand-standing sporting genius by the one man who has been Tyrone football for the guts of 15 years – Peter Canavan.

Canavan played only cameos in this year's championship compared to ten years ago when he dragged Tyrone single-handedly to an All-Ireland final. A much different proposition now, Mickey Harte's team is re-writing what football is, to the chagrin of some old-timers but to the delight of a new generation of fans who want to see corner-backs score exhilarating points and full-forwards defending.

The moments that were Canavan's season were masterpieces of effective timing. The winning free in the last moment of the All-Ireland semi-final against Armagh, possibly the finest football game played in nearly 30 years, and a goal of clinical genius in the All-Ireland final against Kerry.

The free that got Tyrone to the All-Ireland final demonstrated, if nothing else, that for all their talent, this Tyrone team still looked to Canavan in their time of direst need. The free wasn't a hard one but it was crucial. They tossed him the ball, he calmed himself and broke Armagh for another season.

If that score only demonstrated that Canavan was as capable as ever of performing the simple things well under pressure, his goal in the final was the perfect career show-reel. With moments left in the first half, he used his years of experience to glide into a yard of space masterfully made for him by Owen Mulligan, and slide a left foot shot past Diar

Fergal O'Connor, remembered for his social work, and Plato

Fergal O'Connor, priest, philosopher and social campaigner, died on 29 September. He was 78. He had suffered from arthritis since his 20s, and had been increasingly crippled by it in latter years, forcing him, reluctantly, to retire from teaching political philosophy at UCD. Though even after he formally retired, he taught on, teaching elective classes and hosting students and friends, on occasion until late into the night, in the spartan dining hall at his home in the Dominican Priory on Dorset Street.

The great love of his academic life was Plato, and for generations of students (literally – by the time he retired, he was teaching the children of former students) he became almost indistinguishable from the protagonist of Plato's dialogues, Socrates, whose great gift lay in eliciting from people knowledge they did not know they had, forcing them to challenge their convictions and principles in the search for the truth.

Like Socrates, he did not write his philosophy, content instead to live it.

In the 1960s, he set up a hostel for homeless women in Dublin's Sherrard St, and then established Ally, an organisation for unmarried mothers which he ran from the Dominican Priory and often staffed with volunteers from amongst his students. He became widely known through his provocative appearances on the Late, Late Show, which provoked Senator Tomás Ó Maoláin to say of him during a debate on education funding in the Seanad in 1969, "he will poison the minds of a whole generation of students if his attitude is that shown by him on Telefís Éireann". It was an apt, if unwitting, metaphor for O'Connor's chosen vocation as gadfly, and no doubt O'Connor took it as a compliment.

Kate Moss drug scandal

Thirty one year old supermodel Kate Moss was pictured in the Daily Mirror in September allegedly snorting lines of cocaine at a recording session for her boyfriend Pete Doherty's band, Babyshambles. The revelations initially led to her being dropped from high profile advertising campaigns for, among others, H&M, Chanel and Burburry, but as the year comes to a close, she seems to be back on top again.

Londoner Kate was discovered at age 14 by a representative of Storm modelling agency in New York. She was well under the minimum height of 5'8" for female models, and her tiny frame and angular looks clashed with the more traditionally beautiful models of the early 1990s. However, after a shoot for Vogue with emerging photographer Corrine Day in 1994, which showed a semi-naked Moss frolicking on a beach and smiling naturally for the camera, the fashion world changed: the "waif" look, and later, "heroin chic", became the norm, with curvy, pretty models being replaced by young, skinny and often androgynous girls. Moss was the leader of the pack, although her personality and attitude seemed as important as her looks for photographers and designers. She dated rock stars and actors, smoked and drank publicly, and rumours of her wild lifestyle and sexual promiscuity became rife. All the while, however, she was seen on the catwalk and in ad campaigns for Gucci, Calvin Klein, Dolce & Gabbana, Versace and many others. She spent a stint in the expensive Priory Clinic in 1998 for "exhaustion".

In the wake of the drug allegations, Kate's public statement, although apologetic, did not go as far as admitting drug use: "I accept that there are various personal issues that I need to address and have started taking the difficult, yet necessary steps to resolve them." She spent time in a rehabilitation centre in Arizona in October 2005, and completed her first modelling job with designer Roberto Cavalli shortly afterwards. She will soon be seen poking fun at the whole mess in a new ad for Virgin mobiles in which she has a rare speaking part, and her raunchy shots in 2006's Pirelli calender have become some of the most talked-about of the year.

Kate Moss' alleged drug use was caught on cameraphone, a technological advancement that was ubiquitous in 2005. It lends a new immediacy to images of disaster and scandal, which can now be taken and dispatched from the same source, almost in real-time. Footage of the London bombings in July was sent to television stations as it happened, and a cameraphone photo of the bombed Underground made it to the Time Magazine Best Photos of the Year 2005. Pictures of Prince Harry's ill-conceived Nazi costume, also caught on a personal phone, appeared in the tabloids almost before the young prince made it home from his party in January.

Seán óg ó hAilpín From Fiji to Cork to Croker

While his victory speech on All Ireland final day wasn't an overwrought paean to the dead martyrs, it was a clear, uncomplicated message that everyone understood. The speech was in an intense and unfettered Munster Irish, the first hurling captain since Galway's John Connolly in 1980 to speak entirely as Gaeilge. It was a moment of coronation for Ó hAilpín, for as DJ Carey's crown slips with the inevitable passage of time, Ó hAilpín is the game's new king. Hurling celebrates that, while Cork knows it has a new Roy Keane.

He is the focal point of a team which, if it wins a third successive title, is destined for immortality. His dedication to training is renowned – he went for a punishing run the day after last year's All-Ireland final, meeting revellers from the night before as he strolled through the hotel lobby. For all his single-minded dedication, he has transcended traditional notions of what the GAA sees itself to be.

Seán Óg is the identikit perfect hurler. His Fijian physique; the youthful exposure to Australian attitudes to field sports and the immersion in the ways of Cork hurling; his recovery from a bad car crash which left one leg almost entirely shattered embellishes the myths that surrounds him. This aura means that when he's playing badly he's still a great leader.

Cork have refined their style in recent seasons and withstood intense criticism for doing so but the players have never wavered from their own sense of entitlement. It's galling for neutrals that they win games so frequently in the last ten minutes even while underperforming, but history will record this side as an all-time great if they retain their crown. With Ó hAilpín leading them they've become true Rebel greats.