Move over Drumcondra. Now that Offaly has produced a Taoiseach, the great and the good are embracing their roots.
THE PEOPLE
Let's start with the wannabes, principally US presidential hopeful Barack Obama, who we learned a few months ago is really a Moneygall man. Go on, ya good ting. Blue-eyed actor Aidan Quinn has strong Offaly connections - his parents emigrated to Illinois from there and he spent some of his childhood in Birr.
Offaly's best-kept fashion secret is Gladys Adams, whose emporium in Tullamore counts Mary Cowen among its best customers. It is from these rails that she will emerge as First Lady. Carolyn Donnelly, half of one of Ireland's most successful design partnerships, Quin & Donnelly, is a Tullamore girl; the daughter of the town's late newsagent and sister of playwright Neil Donnelly. She remembers "cycling over Kilbeggan bridge and whizzing into town", and to this day, if she sees someone from the town, she'll remember their name instantly.
Odette Rocha grew up in a large family in Birr, where her father was the local chemist. She loved horses - Cash's were the horse dealers in the town - and "we had the Ormond Hunt, the Kinnity Mountains, the beautiful grounds of Birr Castle," she says. She remembers dressing up for Vintage Week in Birr and points to the heritage of the town, its choir and stage guilds.
The county has produced its fair share of sports types, of course. One of Birr's most popular pubs is Brian Whelahan's, owned by arguably the county's best-ever hurler. If you were to mention one Gaelic footballer, it would have to be Séamus Darby. A man of Brain Cowenesque physique (he was, em, well-built for a footballer), he scored one of the most famous goals in football history - the last-minute winning goal in the 1982 All-Ireland final against Kerry, which stopped the Kingdom from winning an unprecedented five-in-a-row. It gets shown again and again on TG4. The Ireland rugby fullback Girvan Dempsey's family has Kinnitty roots, but Girve the Swerve's accent was altered by Terenure College. For the better? You can be the judge of that.
THE SIGHTS
Clonmacnoise on the banks of the Shannon is a monastic site of immense archeological importance. It deserves to be a World Heritage Site and perhaps that will happen now that it is in the Taoiseach-to-be's back garden. Durrow is a heritage story with a happy ending; plans to build a leisure centre on the site of St Columba's seventh-century monastic enclosure were quashed.
Bogs are interesting places and Co Offaly is rich in their subtle beauty, which merges earth and water. Playwright Marina Carr, raised at Pallas Lake in the magical bog landscape about seven miles outside Tullamore, knows the secrets and stories. Her dark, dramatic plays, such as The Mai, By the Bog of Cats, Portia Coughlan and On Raftery's Hill, with their moments of black, menacingly manic manic comedy, are among the most original in Irish theatre. Writer Eugene O'Brien continues the tradition.
Birr Castle's award-winning gardens, famous telescope and science gallery attract some 40,000 visitors a year. Alison Rosse, the present Countess Rosse, is a landscape artist. The late Anne Countess of Rosse was a woman of exceptional elegance and style who left a fine collection of clothing dating from the late 1800 to the 1960s. Fashion makes for interesting social history.
Charleville Castle in Tullamore is considered the finest early 19th-century castle in the country, with its Gothic Revival interior. It will host the Castlepalooza music festival in August.
THE SOUNDS
Country crooner Johnny McEvoy began life in Banagher, while Birr produced Roesy and Mundy, who have put the county on the sonic map. Simon Casey did his hometown of Ballycumber proud as runner-up in the first You're A Star contest and last year 2,700 musicians convened in Tullamore for the largest ever Irish traditional music seisiún. Offaly has also produced showbands aplenty, The Agents from Edenderry among them. Tunes such as The Green Fields Round Ferbane, Dan Fogelberg's Tullamore Dew and The Offaly Rover have all, directly or indirectly, been inspired by the county.
Celebrities Joe Elliot of Def Leppard, Ozzy Osbourne's son Louis and Miriam O'Callaghan had their weddings at Kinnitty Castle, while Shinrone had a brief spell as a music venue and there is evidence that Bono has been to Offaly at least once . . .
With thanks to Deirdre McQuillan, Chris Dooley, Eileen Battersby and Fiona McCann