Lelia doolan biography for kids
•
Lelia Doolan celebrates 90th birthday with ‘nice and easy’ charity skydive
A cultural trailblazer has celebrated her 90th birthday with her first ever skydive.
Lelia Doolan wanted to mark her ninth decade with an event that would twin as a fundraiser for Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) Ireland.
“These men and women give themselves to healing in the likes of Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine. Every penny counts. People are enormously generous,” she said in advance of the jump.
Ms Doolan’s tandem parachute jump last Saturday, when she did a free fall from almost 4,000m at the Irish Parachute Club in Clonbullogue Airfield, Co Offaly, has so far raised over €28,000, surpassing her original €3,000 goal.
READ MORE
“It was shocking, it was shocking at the beginning ... and then it was nice and easy,” said Lelia, moments after she and instructor Łukasz Kucharski landed.
The writer, broadcaster, television producer, film-maker, theatre director, lecturer and environmentalist w
•
Cork-born woman to mark turning 90 with a charity skydive
She also co-founded the Galway Film Fleadh in the late 80s.
The trailblazer is unsure, however, if she will be the oldest Cork native to participate in a tandem skydive on May 6.
The event will take place in Offaly on the day before her milestone birthday.
Lelia is undertaking the challenge to raise vital funds for Doctors Without Borders.
She has already raised €9,015 for the charity and hopes to raise even more cash leading up to the big day.
Ms Doolan is taking plans for the upcoming event in her stride.
“It’s quite a surprise to me to be turning 90. I don’t have any recollection of thinking at 40 or 50 that life was over. There were always things to be done and events to be part of,” she says.
“You just went on doing and being. It doesn’t matter a damn what age you are. A person’s age is irrelevant to their personality.
“You see people who are lively as bees at the age of 90. Meanwhile, there are people a lot y
•
Lelia’s Picture Palace
Lelia Doolan, once described bygd Archbishop John Charles McQuaid as “mad, bad, and dangerous,” has left an indelible mark on Ireland’s arts and culture. She is now struggling to build in Galway a cinema complex for the people of the west of Ireland.
The actress Fionnula Flanagan was searching for words to describe Lelia Doolan. It’s not so easy to capture the essence of a woman who at the short end of her seventies is still bringing the same dervish energy and intelligence to countless endeavors as she has done for many decades.
“She has such brio and has been relentless and tireless in the service of so many great things,” Flanagan says. And then she remembers that the conservative archbishop of huvudstaden i irland, John Charles McQuaid, once described Lelia Doolan as “mad, bad and dangerous.” Flanagan adds, “Now there’s a badge of honor!”
Doolan has made a remarkable and often unheralded contribution to so many parts of Irish life. In theater (the first hona