Sasha Wallace, a son of former Wexford MEP Mick Wallace, seems to be a chip off the old block. Following in his father’s footsteps, he is opening an Italian restaurant/wine bar on Anne Street in Wexford town that sounds a lot like the classy spaghetti joints his father established around Dublin two decades ago. Wallace snr also previously opened a restaurant in Enniscorthy during the 2000s but it has since closed.
Sasha, through a new company Sete Di Vino Ltd, which also runs an Italian food and wine wholesale business, will operate the new restaurant on the site of a former dry cleaners in the Townspark area.
Planning permission was recently granted by Wexford County Council for the conversion, with Sasha’s planning consultant telling the council that Wallace jnr is planning a “family restaurant and wine bar”, similar to those his family “own and operate” in Dublin but “closer to his ancestral home in Wellingtonbridge”.
Strictly speaking the family no longer owns the Dublin restaurants. Last year after questions were raised about why he hadn’t declared ownership of them on his MEP’s declaration of interests, Mick Wallace clarified that he no longer owned them after his banking and Revenue troubles but was being paid €499 a month as an adviser to the chain. Wonder will Mick, who failed to win a seat in Wexford at the general election last weekend, get a pizza the action this time around?
Keith Duffy’s knees’ woes
Anyone who remembers Boyzone’s first appearance on The Late Late Show in 1993 will not be surprised to hear that former member Keith Duffy’s knees aren’t in great nick. The singer and actor has spoken in the past about undergoing surgery on his knees and suffering from arthritis, which he has linked to wear and tear from non-stop performing with the boy band when he was younger.
Duffy’s knees weren’t helped either by a bad fall last year when he was climbing a mountain in Kenya to raise money for his charity foundation, with the singer ending up in hospital. In June he attended Medica Stem Cells in Sandyford, a clinic that claims to use contentious regenerative cell therapy to reduce inflammation and pain in clients’ knees. The clinic posted about Duffy’s attendance on social media and has also featured a testimonial on its website from him in the past, quoting the singer as saying his treatment was “nothing short of miraculous”.
But is looks like the former Coronation Street actor is no longer buddies with the company. Last week Duffy, who did not respond to queries, filed a High Court action against the clinic, which was also contacted for comment but did not respond.
Former taoisigh keep it local artistically
One of the vestiges of power that former taoisigh retain when they leave office is a say in who paints their official portraits. Seán Lemass chose Maurice MacGonigal to capture his likeness in the 1960s at least partly because he had shared a cell with him during the War of Independence. Similarly, James Hanley, who painted Bertie Ahern’s official portrait, previously said he was chosen partly because he lived in the former taoiseach’s constituency.
Enda Kenny has also decided to keep it local. We hear that young Mayo artist Hetty Lawlor has been chosen to make an oil painting of Enda at the tender age of 24. Lawlor, from Kilmeena, near Westport, was the overall winner of the Texaco art competition in 2018, following in the footsteps of her father, who won it in 1984. She went on to become a finalist in Sky’s Portrait Artist of the Year competition.
A period of laureatelessness looms
An update from the Arts Council on the process to choose a successor to Colm Tóibín as the next laureate for fiction with his term due to expire at the end of the year. It says it will issue a call for nominations to arts bodies, libraries, book shops and book clubs shortly, with a deadline for submissions in January.
Those submissions will be reduced to a shortlist by an external committee by the end of January or start of February, with a more international panel choosing the winner some time around the end of March or start of April.
The Arts Council will then meet the winner, discuss the theme for their laureateship and announce them by May. In the intervening period, we will be temporarily laureateless.
One for the books
Speaking of books, we were contacted last week by the owner of the Letterfrack branch of Book at One, the collection of community bookshops financed by Declan Ryan’s One Foundation that we wrote about recently in this column following the closure of one of their stores in Dublin’s Liberties.
They pointed out that another of its book shops in Kildorrery, Co Cork, which we reported had closed, never opened despite exploratory talks taking place and a premises being identified. We are happy to correct the record and remind readers that the project’s existing two bookshops in Louisburgh, Co Mayo, and Letterfrack, Co Galway, remain very much open for business.
RTÉ to SF TD’s rescue
Sinn Féin was criticised before the general election for suggesting it would commission an independent review into RTÉ’s coverage of international conflicts if it got into power. But not all of its TDs have such a jaundiced view of the public broadcaster. Indeed one of its first-time TDs, Shónagh Ní Raghallaigh, who won a seat in Kildare North for the party, appeared on RTÉ’s Home Rescue in April.
The 41-year-old primary schoolteacher called in architect Róisín Murphy, builder Peter Finn and their crew to do up the railway cottage where she lives with her four children in Kildare town after becoming “overwhelmed with a rising tide of clutter” and “a long list of repairs and unfinished projects”.
Happily for all, she was delighted with the results, especially her new kitchen, saying it would make her life “so much easier”.
- Sign up for push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
- Find The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date
- Our In The News podcast is now published daily – Find the latest episode here
