Mary coughlan partner
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Mary Coughlan (politician)
Irish former politician (born 1965)
Mary Coughlan (born 28 May 1965) is an Irish former Fianna Fáil politician who served as Tánaiste from 2008 to 2011, Deputy leader of Fianna Fáil from 2008 to 2011, Minister for Health and Children from January 2011 to March 2011, Minister for Education and Skills from 2010 to 2011, Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment from 2008 to 2010, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food from 2004 to 2008, Minister for Social and Family Affairs from 2002 to 2004 and Minister of State for the Gaeltacht and the Islands from 2001 to 2002. She served as a Teachta Dála (TD) for the Donegal South-West constituency from 1987 to 2011.[1]
Early life
Coughlan was born in Donegal Town in the south of County Donegal in May 1965. Her father was Cathal Coughlan, a Fianna Fáil TD, who died in office in June 1986. She was educated at: Ballydevitt National School, on the outskirts of Donegal Town; the Ursuline College in Sligo, where she was a boarder from 1978 to 1983;[2] and later at University
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MARY COUGHLAN
Biography
Singing the Blues from the Heart
Honesty is the best policy. As it is in song, so it is in life for Mary Coughlan.
"If you don't wash your own dirty linen, the press'll do it for you," she part roars, part giggles in an 'I've got the measure of you, boy' kind of tone. "But they can say what they like because they'll never be able to say anything about me that anybody would be shocked about or that I would be ashamed of. Not any more."
Such a forthright preemptive strike is not untypical of a singer whose first album bore the title Tired and Emotional. At twenty-eight, she was a late starter. At least as far as music was concerned. But behind the surface jocularity which audiences loved and which led them to refer to Coughlan as the Galway rascal, there was a much darker story, a darkness that allows her to sing songs such as Poison Words, a tale of an abusive relationship, with an authority borne of experience.
Coughlan's life, by her own admission, has been rough. The eldest of five children in a far from well-off family, by her mid teens she was
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Mary is Ireland’s greatest jazz and blues singer and “one of our most openly raw performers” (Hotpress). In a career fast approaching its 40th year, she is about to enter its next, exciting stage.
Born in Shantalla, Galway city, Mary has made some of the most uncompromising, wholly personal, and universal music by any Irish artist. While her roots are in jazz and blues - Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith are among her inspirations - pop, rock, folk, and chanson (Edith Piaf is also a touchstone) influences also appear in her work. Now, the next chapter of her distinguished career finds her exploring a little known side of the music of Peggy Lee.
To hear Mary sing, is, as Velvet Thunder said, “to be at the core of the human heart”. It was a voice which first came to wide attention in 1985, when Mary burst onto the Irish music scene with her debut album, Tired and Emotional. That album led to appearances on The Late Late Show, a hit single with ‘Delaney’s Gone Back On The Wine’, and tours of Britain, Germany, and Holland.
She followed that explosive release with Unde
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