Almost famous (part two of two); Who are the next household names to

business Anne Heraghty When Anne Heraghty headed up the flotation of Ireland's second listed recruitment company, CPL, she made the headlines. Why? Because she was and still is the only woman chief executive of an Irish public company, a company who just last month bought out the bulk of the only other listed recruitment company, Marlborough, when it went into receivership.

Like many other companies involved in the IT explosion, CPL is feeling the pinch in recent months, but has diversified away from technological recruitment. Founded by Heraghty in 1989, it also has significant cash reserves to weather the current storm in that area.

So who is Ms Heraghty and how did she crash through the male glass ceiling? From Longford originally, she graduated from University College Dublin with a BA in maths and economics and has literally committed her adult life to the recruitment industry. Deciding to go it alone in '89, she left a secure job with Grafton Recruitment to establish CPL with her husband and the company's business development director, Paul Carroll.

"We have built a very stable infrastructure and we have evaluated all our business processes to ensure they are as efficient as possible," is how this 41-year-old explains CPL's power to survive. And there's a lot more to Heraghty than a power-hungry career woman. In the spare time she dedicates herself to being mother to a six- year-old daughter and is currently allowing herself a short career pause to care for her newborn.

MUSIC Gemma Hayes (below) She's come a long way from Tipperary, but for 24-year-old Gemma Hayes the journey is just beginning. Her debut album Night On My Side - partly produced by Dave Fridmann, knob twiddler for Mercury Rev and The Delgados among others - is a jewel box of shimmering guitar, crested by her spine-tingling voice. It's out on Source Records in May, so start counting the days.

Sitting in the snug of a Dublin pub, eyeing a badly stuffed fox (Ireland's answer to Badly Drawn Boy?) mounted in a cabinet, Hayes explains that she first knew she wanted to devote her life to music when she heard My Bloody Valentine while at boarding school in Limerick. She was miserable away from home and their Loveless album awoke something in her. "I could relate to the passion and emotion," she remembers. "It's so loud and achey and it really gave me hope that there was something out there that was really beautiful and I could go to it. I had never felt that before."

After school she moved to Dublin to attend Trinity College but soon dropped out and started gigging all over the city, opening for everyone from Al Green to local punk bands. Julian Lennon saw her play and invited her to sing a duet on his album, something she now seems faintly embarrassed about.

Night On My Side was partly recorded at Tarbox Studios in the wilds of upstate New York, where the local store sold bread, milk and bullets, and a neighbour kept lions as pets. Fittingly, this is a record which has teeth. "I like the idea of making music that has sweetness to it," she explains. "But it ought to have intensity too."

David Kitt (pictured over) David Kitt is something of an anomaly on this list in that he is already extremely famous - at least in Ireland. The Sunday Herald meets him the day after he has bagged the award for best solo male at the Irish music awards, beating the likes of Van Morrison and Shane MacGowan to the gong. In his acceptance speech he made fun of Bono and then stayed until 7am at the U2 aftershow party, where he was told by a bouncer that he didn't mind him smoking a spliff but could he please not dance on the furniture? Sleep deprivation has ensured that this normally mellow 26-year-old is so laid back you could serve drinks off him.

The music is like that too. Small Moments and The Big Romance are two albums of chilled folktronica, all acoustic guitars and somnambulent beats. He is often called the new David Gray but actually has more in common with Mogwai.

Kitt's father is Tom Kitt, a well known Irish politician, so he has grown up in the glare of the public eye, an experience which has prepared him for fame in his own right. His father also taught him to play guitar. "He taught me when I was about seven or eight," he remembers. "The first music I heard when I came home from hospital was probably his acoustic guitar. And he used to sing me to sleep. So I've got an immediate affinity with that sound."

UK success has so far eluded Kitt, but all that is likely to change next year when he releases his third album, which he promises will be one of "greater extremes, a bit unsettling".

SPORT john o'shea (below) The vast superstore that Manchester United opened in the centre of Dublin three years ago was recently closed due to lack of interest. Thankfully for manager Sir Alex Ferguson there is still a burgeoning trade between Ireland and Old Trafford itself.

John O'Shea is the latest from the conveyor belt of talent to join United from the Republic. The country has been such a rich source that Ferguson now acts more quickly than ever to snap up emerging prospects; while Roy Keane and Denis Irwin had to be bought from rival English clubs, O'Shea, born in Waterford, was a United trainee before signing his professional form at the age of 18.

Over the past three months O'Shea - who will be 22 in April - has broken into the first team after previous spells on loan to Bournemouth and Royal Antwerp, United's Belgian feeder club. At 6ft 3in his commanding presence is also recognised by Republic manager Mick McCarthy, who handed him a debut against Croatia in August.

Ferguson took O'Shea aside in training one morning and simply advised him to study veteran defender Laurent Blanc's every move. Since then, Blanc has announced he will retire this summer and Ferguson has extended O'Shea's contract by several years. "I think it's going to happen for me," says O'Shea. Happily, it looks like it is.

ART Gary Coyle "I'm told," says Gary Coyle, "that it's very painful being stung on the penis by a jellyfish." Coyle, who is 36 and the spitting image of the actor Tim Robbins, is one of Ireland's most interesting young artists. If you have seen his work it will probably have been as part of the touring show At Sea, which appeared at Tate Liverpool last year. Coyle spent one year swimming daily in the sea at Sandycove, outside Dublin, taking photographs with an waterproof camera, an exercise he would have attempted naked were it not for the hazards detailed above. In any case, whittling 3500 exposures down to about 40 frames, he ended up with some extraordinary photographs - the sea pictured at eye-level, often threatening, always beautiful.

By the time this article appears, Coyle will be in Las Vegas, on "a pilgrimage to the Mecca of capitalism", photographing cheap downtown hotel rooms. That's quite a contrast with his other current project: photographing street corners and back lanes in his home town of Dun Laoghaire, locations where people have died. He is also writing about his memories of the deaths, some of which were notorious killings. "When I was seven, a baby was found murdered up a back lane, stabbed 40 times with a knitting needle," he remembers. "The story has hung in my mind for years."

MARGARET CORCORAN (below) The first time Corcoran saw a painting that really blew her mind she was six. It was at the National Gallery in Dublin, a portrait of an Indian woman into which the artist had incorporated real pearls. It was a magical experience and Corcoran wanted to know exactly how the effect had been achieved; she has never stopped asking questions about painting since that day.

Corcoran's paintings interact with art history, specifically with the way Old Masters have portrayed females. She takes Ingres' Portrait Of Madame Aymon and conceals her face with tumour-like bursts of flowers, while her adaptation of Manet's Woman With A Parrot removes the woman altogether, leaving a ghostly robe floating against the dark background. She is currently putting a spin on Courbet's L'Origine du Monde. "It's a very rude picture, quite scandalous," she says. "It's a full-on vagina basically and you can't see the arms and legs. A very strange way to portray a woman."

Corcoran, 39, is also working on a series of famous landscapes incorporated into the shape of Rorschach inkblots.

Film Damien O'Donnell When you have a nightmare experience actually making your first feature film, the last thing you expect is for the shrewd boss of Miramax films, Harvey Weinstein, to snap up the US and Australian rights before he's even seen it. But that's exactly what happened to Dubliner Damien O'Donnell. And his feature debut, East is East went on to unite the typically recalcitrant critics at the Cannes Film Festival in unanimous praise. It proceeded to win both the BAFTA for Best Film and the Prix Media in 2000. A serious comedy of generational conflicts in early Seventies Manchester, East is East deals with the failing attempts of a strictly traditional Pakistani immigrant to force his seven half- Irish children to conform to his values and what happens when he tries to arrange marriages for his two sons. Adapted for screen from its stage play origins by Ayub Khan-Din, its author personally requested O'Donnell to direct after he saw a screening of O'Donnell's short film Thirty Five Aside on BBC 2's The Talent series. Proceeding to win best short film prize from the show's jury chaired by Alan Parker, this hilarious tale of a schoolboy's attempts to be accepted at his new school proceeded to collect over 30 awards at film festivals all over the world.

But O'Donnell's East is East experience wasn't always positive. "It was horrible," he remembers. "I had a real baptism by fire and it was raining all the time. There was so much more pressure involved. Some people weren't talking to each other, including me, and there was a lot of paranoia." Hopefully the remarkably positive reaction the final result garnered around the world will have done something to ease the bad memories.

Cathal Gaffney & Darragh O'Connell (above ) Cathal Gaffney and Darragh O'Connell, aka Brown Bag Films, met while finishing their secondary education at Senior College Ballyfermot, County Dublin. Who would have guessed that just eight years later they would be at this year's Oscars for their five-minute film, Give Up Yer Aul Sins - one of the nominees in the short film category.

Based on recordings made in the Fifties at a small Dublin primary school, the stars of their film are the voices of tiny children presenting personal recitations of Bible stories. And Brown Bag has painted hilariously typical cartoons to animate these extremely colourful interpretations to give them a fresh breath of life.

The two cut their teeth on Irish youth television programmes and children's animations, and broke on to the international scene with Warner Bros' full-length animation, the King and I.

"Initially we were only supposed to do a very small amount but, it just grew and grew," remembers O'Connell. Grow it did until the boys found themselves as the European production hub for the whole project. But apart from their glide down the red carpet on Oscar night, these are strictly back stage boys. And though you may not know their faces, you will soon become very familiar with their artwork.

writing Sean O'Reilly He's a man out of time, Sean O'Reilly. Those who know are calling him the most exciting young writer to have come out of Ireland in a long time, and that's true, but he's not too keen on this contemporary stuff at all. He'd much rather be living in Paris between the wars. "Henry Miller and all that crowd, boozing and trying to write books, dreaming big dreams. It's a period I would love to have caught a glimpse of."

Hearing that, it makes sense that O'Reilly's recently published debut novel Love And Sleep has more in common with the great European existentialist books than your Roddy Doyles or whoever. The novel is narrated by Niall, an angsty young man recently returned to his native Derry after living in Rome. He falls in with Lorna and their dysfunctional relationship stumbles along a rocky road strewn with drunken arguments and humiliating sex. It's great. Now back in Dublin after eight months living in a cottage in County Clare, he's well into his second novel.

O'Reilly, who's 32, was born and brought up in Derry, moving to London when he was 16. "If I had been caught reading a book in the house," he says, "me da would have slapped me round the head and kicked me out in the street." So what was it that turned him on to writing? "Seeing everything around me collapse. The streets were crazy, y'know? Especially after the hunger strikes. How could these men possibly be allowed to die? I had to go off and try to find some answers. I'm still looking."

John Connolly It's such an obvious thing to say, but it's irresistible. Meet the Irish Ian Rankin - the country's foremost crime writer, who revels in urban squalor and does a neat turn in metaphysical thought and Renaissance anatomy. Born in 1968 in Dublin to a civil servant and a teacher, he grew up on the pretty rough but glamorous-sounding Rialto housing estate, and worked as a journalist, barman, local government official, waiter and general dogsbody at Harrods before finding fame and fortune in crime-writing.

After studying English at Trinity College, Dublin, he took a Masters degree in journalism at Dublin City University before freelancing for The Irish Times for five years. His first novel, Every Dead Thing, was published in 1999, six years after he began writing it. It introduced the character of Charlie Parker, a former policeman, now hunting the killer of his wife and daughter. Subsequent books include Dark Hollow (2000), The Killing Kind (2001) and the very latest, The White Road, is due for release this month. Connolly still lives in Dublin. "I always found British crime fiction lacking in compassion for the victim," he said once, when asked about his love of American crime fiction." It's a formula that's worked pretty well too.

THEATRE Eugene O'Brien (above) One day, a couple of years ago, Eugene O'Brien - a jobbing Irish actor who had been in Ballykissangel and the like - attended an audition for the Rebel Heart, a BBC drama about the Easter Rising. The script was terrible, the part tiny, and it seemed like every actor in Ireland had turned up at the same time. O'Brien was holding a script of his own that day, a wee thing he'd written, and he spoke to it feverishly as he walked out of the audition and turned his back on an acting career that wasn't really going anywhere. "I hightailed it out of there and walked along the canal, talking to the script," he recalls. "I was saying 'F**kin' hell, you've got to get me out of this'."

That script was Eden, the play which has made O'Brien, at the age of 34, Ireland's most celebrated new playwright. A bawdy two-hander about a failing marriage, Eden was first performed at Dublin's Peacock Theatre in January 2001, where it was an instant smash. It then toured the entire country before returning in triumph to Dublin's famous Abbey Theatre, selling out the 600 seats night after night.

O'Brien has two more plays and some film ideas up his sleeve, and is currently writing a TV series for the BBC to be set - like Eden - in the Irish midlands, which is where he comes from. "It's about the weekends and people looking for love," he says. "I want to do it in a really raw, authentic way. I think people would dig it."u

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