Almost famous; Who are the next household names to come out of

Words Peter Ross, Lesley McDowell, Michael Grant, Sofa GormanMain

ACTING Colin Farrell (right) Right at the top of Ireland's Hollywood A-List of young actors, Farrell was born on March 31, 1976, in Castle Knock, Dublin. As the son of Irish footballer Eamon Farrell, he did intend to pull on the boots himself, but instead hopped off for a quick trip round Australia and enrolled in drama school on his return. It wasn't a bad decision - while he was attending classes at the Gaiety Drama School in Dublin, he auditioned for BBC1's Ballykissangel and got the part.

It was his first TV break, but the lure of cinema was too strong and before long Farrell was off to Hollywood to star in Joel Schumacher's Tigerland, about American soldiers taken to backwoods of Louisiana in 1971 to prepare for Vietnam, where he played Texan Roland Bozz. It won him the Best Actor Award from Boston Society of Film Critics and a handy monicker as the Irish Brad Pitt. After Tigerland came Ordinary Decent Criminals with Kevin Spacey and an appearance at the Donmar Warehouse in London in A Little World of Our Own.

Work has never been a problem for the highly photogenic Farrell, although his personal life has been less straightforward. He married film actress Amelia Warren (Lorna Doone, Take a Girl Like You) in July 2001 after a whirlwind romance. Alas, barely six months later they had filed for divorce.

Due to be seen in the critically acclaimed WWII PoW drama Hart'sWar with Bruce Willis, he will also be lining up shortly in Minority Report, a time-travel science fiction story with Tom Cruise, directed by Steven Spielberg. His latest feature is The Farm, widely regarded to secure his place as a major-league player. Playing a CIA agent, Farrell will star alongside Al Pacino before he starts filming Daredevil due for release next year, with Ben Affleck.

Flora Montgomery (left) Montgomery's most notable role to date for Scottish audiences at least, was in an episode of Monarch of the Glen, where she played a down-at-heel, aristocratic blonde temptress, planning to nab our Archie for his money. After starring in school plays like many an aspiring thesp, Montgomery, 27, headed for theatre and gave notable performances in Strindberg's Miss Julie as well as various productions in London's West End.

She was pinpointed, though, as one-to-watch after her starring role in When Brendan Met Trudy which was released just two years ago. She appeared with Pauline McLynn - Mrs Doyle in the Father Ted - but even so, the romantic comedy was none too successful at the box office or with the critics. (And having Kieron J Walsh announce that there were so few good-looking women in Ireland, when he set eyes on Montgomery he simply said, Thank God, probably didn't help).

Even a script by Roddy Doyle didn't improve matters. But it did give Montgomery, from Killyleagh, County Down, the publicity she needed and last year she starred in Discovery of Heaven alongside Stephen Fry and Greg Wise (Mr Emma Thompson). A product of the Dublin's Gaiety School of Acting, she is currently appearing in The Shape of Things with Cillian Murphy.

Cillian Murphy Born in Cork, Murphy first came to notice when he appeared in the Corcadora production of Enda Walsh's play, Disco Pigs. Although he was interested in acting at school, it wasn't until he was at University College Cork, studying law, that he decided to audition for the play. It was a huge success, taking him to Edinburgh, Toronto and Budapest, before he was cast in the film version.

Directed by Kirsten Sheridan, daughter of Jim "My Left Foot" Sheridan, in her debut feature, Disco Pigs told the violent but often funny rites-of-passage story of two 17-year-olds, Pig and Runt, who share a birthday and are inseparable friends. The success of his performance in the film meant a host of roles: as a soldier in The Trench by William Boyd, recently shown on BBC television; as a brash young Irishman in the US film Sunburn; as a suicidal young man in The Smiling Suicide Club. Oh, and with his handsome, baby-cute looks he also managed to bag the Favourite Actor Award in last year's GayIreland.com Poll results, just the thing to make his mum, a French teacher, very proud indeed.

After more leading roles in How Harry Became a Tree (2001) which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and On the Edge (2001), Murphy completed 28 Days Later, directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland and is currently appearing at Dublin's Gaiety Theatre production of The Shape of Things by Neil LaBute.

Elaine Cassidy At just 21, Cassidy has already amassed a pretty formidable and enviable CV of film and TV credits. Although she didn't say a word in her latest film where she played the mute maid Lydia in the Nicole Kidman vehicle The Others, she was creepily memorable.

Born in Dublin in 1980, Cassidy's break came with her appearance in Disco Pigs, where she played Runt to Cillian Murphy's Pig. But it was Atom Egoyan's film Felicia's Journey, where she starred in the title role opposite Bob Hoskins, that really set Cassidy on the path to fame, as she was nominated for a Most Promising Actress award at the Geneva Film Festival.

Her most recent appearance for British audiences came at Christmas when she starred alongside Bob Hoskins (again) and James Fox in the BBC production of the Arthur Conan Doyle adventure, The Lost World. But TV won't hold on to her for long - Cassidy is due to begin filming The Boy with another Hollywood legend, Holly Hunter.

Fashion Antonia Campbell Hughes She may be just 23, but fashion designer Antonia Campbell Hughes is certainly making her presence felt. Reflecting an internationalism, independence and faith in her own obvious talent, she launched her individual label over a year and a half ago at the influential Design Centre show and instantly became the focus for serious fashion mavens at home and abroad.

She studied for some time at Ireland's National College of Art and Design before graduating from the Grafton Academy, an institution specifically for fashion. During her time at college, she had already sampled work experience with designers such as Bella Freud (now designer-in-chief for Jaeger), Donna Karan and John Rocha. And last year she had an extended stint with Quin & Donnelly.

Known as Toni to those on the inside, her highly-tailored work is defined by its structure. The hard planes, sharp angular lines and asymmetric pleats of her coats and jackets all contrast strongly with soft, draping, curved hems and floating sleeves of her chiffon and satin dresses and blouses. This is powerful delicacy at its best. Her spring/summer 2002 collection, entitled Romancing Armour was presented at the recent Paris shows and her work is now stocked internationally in some of the most exclusive boutiques.

Leigh Tucker Unlike in Britain, being the next generation in an established Irish fashion dynasty is actually a constraint rather than an advantage. People who stick with the family trade are dismissed as being somewhat less than capable when the reverse is typically true. If you manage to satisfy the harshest critics of all, your flesh and blood, the average consumer is easy. And 28-year-old Dublin designer Leigh Tucker has certainly proved her elevated place in the fashion establishment.

Bringing one of the oldest Irish fashion families shooting into the future with her innovative designs, you can find her flattering designs in exclusive boutiques and mainstream department stores from Mexico to Singapore as well as the length and breadth of Ireland. But there are two sides to this girl. She's not only a creator; she's also got a clever commercial head.

Graduating from college in 1997, she noticed a gap in the clothing market for upmarket boutiques stocking unique rather than mass- produced garments. Four months later she opened Costume in the centre of Dublin and spent the next year immersed in the retail side of the business, working out of London's fashion district while her siblings looked after the shop at home. "But I wasn't using the craft I'd spent so many years learning," she explains, "so I came back to Ireland and claimed a small space downstairs in the shop as my designing area."

Sales took off quickly and, as her success expanded, Tucker moved into her own factory studio to create her signature tailored look, combining menswear fabrics with delicate and discreet feminine touches. With her label already gracing some of Ireland's most stylish people, now is the time to invest in a Tucker original.

Helen Cody Though she was once known as the bag lady, this is anything but a derogatory depiction of Helen Cody. It is instead a reference to her comprehensive conquering of the accessory market both nationally and internationally. If you want a couture handbag, Cody is the one to make it for you. And, with her current expansion into the clothing market, she'll make you an outfit you'll want to hang on to.

Another NCAD graduate, Cody established herself as a stylist for a number of major Irish publications. But she was far too inspired to limit herself to using other people's creations and three years ago she launched her first handbag collection. Last year she took this resourcefulness one step further and dipped her toe into the clothing market for the first time with a ready-to-wear range. It won the Peter Mark/Late Late Show Young Designer of the Year award.

Though her first outing was laced with her own tongue-in-cheek humour and modern angles, her next was the complete opposite: utterly elegant, utterly contemporary and utterly sexy. "I sympathise with the does-my-bum-look-big-in-this syndrome so there are no waistbands. I wanted the look to be as seamless as possible, so fewer bulges for the wearer," she says.

FOOD Abigail Colleran Just a couple of months ago, at the most prestigious event in the Irish culinary calendar, a 21-year old Mayo lass cooked up a storm to beat off severe male competition and walk away with the coveted title of Bailey's Euro-Toques Young Chef of the Year.

Abigail Colleran may not have the profile yet of English counterparts such as Jamie "pukka" Oliver or Nigella "sex kitten" Lawson, but it can only be a matter of time. Currently serving her time as demi-chef de partie at the Dublin dining emporium Bang Cafe, she honed her gastronomic skills in Galway and is still pursuing further studies.

She was awarded the Euro-Toque crown after submitting an essay, undergoing an interview on food-related issues and participating in a culinary skills test for a critical panel of food experts. If that wasn't enough to curdle any milk, the five selected finalists were then required to prepare a gourmet luncheon for 100 assembled guests from the media and restaurant industries. But it's not all about the fame and acclaim. The icing on the cake of her culinary prize is an eight-week stage learning the ropes in Obauer, a top Euro-Toques restaurant 35km outside Satzberg in Austria.

ArchitectURE Tom de Paor (below) He lives in a house, a very big house in a graveyard. Well, actually, Tom de Paor doesn't live there yet, but he will, just as soon as he finishes building the thing, has the priest round to bless it, and plays plenty of AC/DC at the housewarming party.

The two words most often used to describe Ireland's hottest architect are "visionary" and "controversial", and when he invites you to visit his home it's not hard to see why. A concrete structure in the grounds of a Dublin church, the house will be breathtakingly contemporary when completed in June, but its most notable feature at the moment is that it is underground.

When construction began, they took 22 bodies out of the ground, all women and children, most likely victims of cholera or famine. You can understand why the archaeologists would be excited but doesn't de Paor find it rather unsettling? "Not at all. If you have any kind of spirituality at all you understand that they are just a husk. I find it quite comforting. This is good ground to be in."

He has loads of other projects on the go: homes in Donegal, Cork and India; a garden in Japan; some rethinking of the A13 motorway, and a small towerblock for the elderly. De Paor, 34, is fiercely enthusiastic and could theorise for ages about what makes his work special, but he puts it best when he says, "I just really like buildings."

politics Ivana Bacik (above) There are some people who do their best to draw attention to themselves and there are those to whom attention is naturally drawn. And Ivana Bacik is like an electrified magnet. Rarely out of the headlines, she somehow maintains a day job as Reid Professor of Criminal Law, Criminology and Penology at Trinity College Dublin - a coveted post formerly held by both Mary Robinson and President Mary McAleese.

As editor of the Irish Criminal Law Journal since 1997 and the author of important works on human rights, constitutional law and criminology, it's clear she has earned the respect attributed to her by her peers. She co-ordinated an EU-funded study on rape law in different European jurisdictions and has carried out consultancy work with the Council of Europe and the International Labour Organisation.

But it is her extra-curricular work that has made Bacik one of the most high profile figures in recent Irish political debates. A fervent protester since her early college days, this is a woman who believes in action and follow-through rather than hollow promises made on election campaigns. A feminist campaigner and vocal pro- choice activist, her most recent platform was as the spokesperson for the Alliance for a No Vote group in the Abortion referendum held in Ireland at the beginning of the month and voice for the umbrella group Abortion Reform.

Something of an all-rounder when it comes to human rights, Bacik also raises her head above the parapet to broach unpopular refugee issues and even question the Irish legal system. This is one woman who might be wasted following her predecessors into the presidential job. There's a growing suspicion she would serve her country best as a future prime minister.

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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