Since the days when it was known as the Kilkenny Design Centre, the shop on Dublin's Nassau Street has seen plenty of change and on Tuesday evening its latest incarnation was revealed. In keeping with a more minimalist era, the shop is now simply called Kilkenny - although there was nothing minimalist about the party which went into swing from early afternoon right into the night. The Minister for Public Enterprise, Mary O'Rourke, was asked to do the honours, and was so anxious to oblige that she requested that the opening day be changed to one on which she was available.
She was the perfect person for the job as not only is she a regular customer (Mo Mowlam visited her for tea recently and asked where the tea cups were from: "Where else?" said Mary), and she also got the party going. "It's like a pageant. We're all appearing from all over the place," she cried as she popped up on the mezzanine. After likening the takeover of Kilkenny by Blarney Woollen Mills in 1988 to the Cabinet kerfuffle of the time, she declared that its dynamic directors, Marian O'Gorman and Bernadette Kelleher-Nolan, should definitely be in government.
Other guests included model Marie Staunton, PR supremo Rhona Blake and her sister, barrister Judy Blake, to whom Mary O'Rourke confided that she had always had leanings toward the Bar. Also there were Kilkenny director Kevin Kelleher; hairdresser Robert Chambers; Judy Greene of Lime and Lemongrass foods; architect Alfred Cochrane; model Ali Phelan, and Geoff Caird and Catherine Melvin of Chocca Mocca, who have taken on a concession in the new store. They are in the midst of moving their home and factory out of Greater Gridlocked Dublin and down to Hare Island in Co Cork, where they reckon commuting to work (by boat) will take only 20 minutes.