The Millbank Theatre are delighted to announce another talented music act coming to our stage. The award winning “The Breath” come to the Millbank Theatre Sunday November 10th.
The Breath is Manchester-based guitarist Stuart McCallum and singer/flautist Ríoghnach Connolly. They met on the city’s gig circuit in the late noughties. An unlikely pairing though it was, he an acclaimed guitar whiz, ex long-time member of The Cinematic Orchestra and a softly spoken Manchester urbanite, she a folk singer with a larger-than-life personality and a powerful voice to match.
The Breath have released three albums on Peter Gabriel’s Real World label.
‘Only Stories (Let the Cards Fall Revisited)’ reimagining previous work (alongside two new songs) took the music back to its acoustic roots. This new direction would see Ríoghnach Connolly receive an RTÉ Folk Award nomination for Best Folk Singer and win Folk Singer Of The Year at the 2019 BBC R2 Folk Awards for which the duo were also nominated as Best Duo/Group.
In readiness for the spooky season, St Catherine’s National School Parents’ Association held a Halloween Costume Swap on Saturday 5th October in conjunction with Rush Tidy Towns. It was a very busy morning as many visitors to the St Catherine’s school hall brought and swapped their costumes and were entertained by games provided by Let’s Play Rush. It was great to see the circular economy in action as over 80 costumes were swapped on the day.
The next similar initiative will be the Christmas Jumper Swap in Rush Community Centre on Saturday 23rd November.
Rush Community Council will hold it’s 2024 AGM in the Community Centre at 8pm on Wednesday the 20th of November. All are welcome to attend. The AGM will hear presentations from the Community Council and it’s sub-committees Rush Tidy Towns, Rush Heritage and Tourism, the Community Development Group and the Christmas Lights Committee on the great work that they have done throughout the year.
Rush Community Council Chairperson, Brian Doherty said that the Community Council are particularly keen for people to attend who wish to volunteer to assist with the Community Council and its subgroups.
“The lifeblood of any community is its volunteers and in Rush we are truly blessed with a strong culture and history of local people donating significant time and energy to give back to the town. Whether it be the Rush Tidy Towns army, the Let’s Play Rush events, the great work that Rush 38th Scouts do, or the annual harbour festival a lot what you see around Rush in any given year is fuelled almost entirely by volunteer energy. But we need more of it, we need new volunteers for all of our local groups and for the Community Council itself in order to achieve even more in the coming years. We are particularly interested in meeting those people who are new to Rush and may wish to get involved,” he said.
If you are interested in volunteering, please come to the Community Council AGM and find out more about how to get involved.
The Rush Multipurpose Youth Facility (RMYF) held a very successful open day on the 3 of Oct at the newly refurbished Facility (Martins Shop) Millbank Rush.
The Open day was put together by the board of the RMYF and was held to promote the activities of the facility to the local community. The refurbishment of RMYF has transformed the building into vibrant welcoming space that will benefit of the youth in the surrounding area. Many of multipurpose rooms suitable for, music, drama, dancing, after school services, youth support, yoga, Mindfulness and many other activities.
We are keen to here from people and groups that would like to utilise that space, we meet everyone with an open mind and are there to help our users grow and develop their programmes. We had a very successful open event there was huge interest in the new facility, and we had many enquires.
More importantly it was great fun on the night, with refreshments, music and networking with people from the area. The Facility in already very busy with new users and enquiries. RMYF (Martins Shop) will be a great asset for the youth in our community. Its refurbishment represents a significant investment in local development and will offer high-quality spaces for various activities. The facility will offer enhanced resources and opportunities for youth and community groups alike. RMYF is proud of this vital initiative and looks forward to seeing the facility flourish as a cornerstone of community life in Rush.
We are looking for people to help with the running of the building and would love to here from anybody who would like to give of there time to support this community project. Please contact RMYF at: info@rmyf.ie or go to our website at www.rmyf.ie
The Millbank Theatre and Rush Pantomime Group are busy preparing the theatre once again this Christmas for another fun filled Panto for all the family!
Barry Kavanagh directs the production again this year with a dream team in place of Eimear Sheridan as Choreographer and Colin Sloan as Musical Director. Script by Ritchie Smith.
Rehearsals kicked off nice and early in September, (oh yes they did!!!!) with a very talented youth troop from the area who are now ready to wow audiences with a nice variety of singing, acting and dancing to entertain throughout the festive season. Please note, The oldies on stage are very talented too!!
Hilariously Funny, Colourful and Filled with Christmas Cheer, Rush audiences will be brought on a journey from The Millbank Theatre to the Kingdom Of Scandinavia.
Frozen Solid runs from December 5th -29th at the Millbank Theatre. Book online at www.millbanktheatre.ie
With Last year’s Jack and The Beanstalk proving a sell out success it is advisable to get booking as soon as possible!
Leonard Cohen would have celebrated his 90th birthday in September this year. The event was marked by a “Leonard Cohen Birthday Bash” as part of the “Meet Me At The Altar” 2024 music season at Rush Library. Curated by Pat Burke, these performances have been running since July 2022 and have become a fixture in the local calendar with shows on Saturday afternoons from July to December.
Pat conceived this latest idea having seen various Cohen tributes in Dublin and felt that there was ample local talent to stage a similar performance Leonard’s birthday was actually September 21st, but this coincided with the launch of local man Eoghan Fyne’s art exhibition at the library altar space. So, the event was a belated birthday celebration. Eoghan was there himself (a long-standing Cohen fan) and kindly offered to mount a Leonard Cohen framed poster on his (much spattered!) easel as a backdrop to the performance.
Pat kicked off the event himself, performing “Dance me to the end of love”, the opening song for many Leonard Cohen concerts in the later years. This was followed by Ed Byrne who travelled from Kildare just to perform, and he delivered “Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye” and “Who by fire” on his trademark jazz guitar. Louise Emerson gave us an unaccompanied sung version of a Cohen poem titled “Song to make me still”. Then it was back to the songs and Ciarán Saunders sang a lovely stripped-back version of the classic “Hallelujah”.
The O’Donovan clan were there in force; Ritch performed “First we take Manhattan” and brothers Robbie and James gave us “Take this waltz”. In between, we had a tender version of “If it be your will” by Seán De Burca and Laura Bissett. On then to Adrian Leonard, who gave us a brace of songs; “Famous blue raincoat” and “Bird on a wire”. Finally, Tess Doherty ably backed by dad Brian on 12-string guitar, sang a Boygenius cover called “Leonard Cohen”, a quirky and delightful song that only goes to prove Leonard’s enduring popularity and influence on contemporary music. The show came to a rousing end with “So long Marianne” with everyone back on stage and the audience joining in for the chorus.
Meet Me At The Altar is delighted to announce that Chien Buggle will be performing solo in the library on Saturday 30th November, at 3pm. Chien is a member of the Dublin Guitar Quartet, a group formed in 2001 and which specialises in the performance of contemporary classical music, particularly music associated with minimalist composers.
Rush Eco Group
We were delighted to be invited by Fingal County Council as part of Rush Eco Group, to speak at a Dublin-wide Climate Action conference in the Mansion House in September. We got to share the background to setting up the group, discuss the projects which we received €59.5k funding for across the town, and learn from other like-minded people on their drive to sustainability.
Let’s Play Rush
What a fantastic day we had at the Let’s Play Rush free family fun and sports event at Tayluers Point in Rush on August 17th. Well done to all the medal winners. Thank you to Minister Joe O’Brien TD for Dublin Fingal and Cllr Robert O’Donoghue the acting mayor for presenting most of the medals and thank you to the volunteers from Rush Tidy Towns, the 38th Rush Scout Group and Rush Community Council for making the day happen. Finally thank you to Fingal County Council for providing grant funding for this event.
Calendar photos
Calling all budding photographers. You have just a few more weeks to submit your photos for our 2025 Rush Tidy Towns Calendar. We are trying to cover all aspects of Rush from the gorgeous views we have to the sports we play and everything else in between, and in all seasons. To enter your photo(s), please send all shots by e-mail only to dianaodonohue14@gmail.com. Each photographer featured in a month will be invited to a launch event and receive a free calendar. Please bear in mind that that submitted images must be of adequate resolution to print out on A4 size. Good luck and get snapping.
Children at St Catherine’s National School met with staff at Tesco in Rush to launch their collection for the Tesco Community Fund. You can help to raise funds for the school’s new PE equipment by putting your blue tokens in the middle box for St Catherine’s School. The appeal runs for twelve weeks. Thank you to Tesco for their generous support of the school”.
As the school year and the start of meetings in the new Council term are now well underway. Over the summer the Council have tendered for a consultancy team to produce the upcoming Rush Town Centre First Plan, it is hoped that the consultants can be put in place before the end of September and meetings with interested groups in the community can start soon after that.
At the Area Committee, Councillor Rob O’Donoghue spoke in regard to upcoming initiatives he hopes to work on in the coming term in Rush.
The first meeting of the Rush Sports Committee of this Council term to discuss the future sporting facilities north of St Catherines is to take place in September to get a progress report on development of the space for the clubs and community.
O’Donoghue commented, ‘the Town Centre First Plan will involve extensive public consultation asking the people of Rush, how they would like to see the town centre develop, it will be the guidelines for future development of the town, and I hope that as many people as possible will get involved once the process kicks off. I am also excited by the prospect of the provision of grass pitch facilities for the clubs in Rush as part of phase 1 of the Rush Recreational Hub.’
Rush Musical Society Singers made their International Debut last month at the Praha International Music Festival in Prague. The Rush group were among 11 groups from 7 countries to take part in the festival.
Countries represented were; Germany, Poland, Romania, Turkey, Korea, Hungary and Ireland. Many of the groups and orchestras are well established in their own countries and internationally performing music from jazz, sacred music, Mozart, Rossini to modern classics.
RMS Singers first performance at the festival was to a packed house in the main auditorium of the Municipal Library in the International Concert of Friendship on August 30th. RMS Singers sang acapella under Director Colin Sloan and were met with a fantastic reception. Following this RMS Singers were chosen to close the festival with a concert performance on August 31st.
The atmosphere was electric in the packed church of St Salvator just off the main square in Prague as RMS Singers took to the stage. RMS Singers thrilled with vocal arrangements written for the group by Director Colin Sloan. The programme included the music of Freddie Mercury, Beach Boys, Glen Hansard, Rainbow, Bonnie Tyler to the African ‘Calling of the Dawn’ - Baba Yetu by Christopher Tin sung in Swahili. The standing ovations from the audience raised the roof on St Salvator with RMS Singers being praised as the highlight performance of the festival.
From start to finish the trip was a joy for the 35 members who travelled to Prague. There was craic a plenty, the beauty and splendour of Prague, lots of song, on and off stage, beautiful food with a wonderful group of people to share it all with. This was the first but hopefully not the last International Performance by RMS Singers. RMS Singers next concert will be in St Catherine’s School, Rush on 8th November.
RMS Singers new season starts on Monday 16th September. If you want to experience the joy of singing come along to the Strand Bar, Rush Mondays at 8.30pm or Thursdays at 8pm. New Members Welcome.
Contact Details: secretary@rushmusicalsociety.com or call 086-8740713 after business hours for further information