In association with Honda we’re bringing you a series on Irish men who’ve changed the world. It’s difficult to imagine that there could be others among us who could challenge the brilliance of Richard Dunne or Michael Fassbender, but you’d be surprised.
Bram Stoker
Bram is not just famous for having the most amazing name given to any Irishman (we bet he could never find a ‘Bram’ key chain in gifts shops though…); the Clontarf man also gave us one of the most iconic literary figures of all time – Count Dracula. Ever-present and with a lifespan of hundreds of years, the Count is basically an even scarier version of Twink.
Much like the character itself, Dracula refuses to die and these days his influence can be seen in multiple TV and film adaptations, a US breakfast cereal (“Count Chocula”), the Muppet character Count von Count and an actor who has portrayed him no less than ten times on film, Christopher Lee. At 90 years of age and still in fine fettle, we reckon that Lee might actually secretly be the undead character at this stage.
Released in 1897, Dracula was a break from the norm for Stoker – who had previously written romantic tales – but brought instant success, despite the fact that the author had never visited Eastern Europe, the setting of the iconic novel.
In a world in which the term ‘vampire’ nowadays conjures up images of defanged pretty boys swooning over the wooden charisma vacuum that is Kristen Stewart, we miss Stoker more than ever.
Bob Geldof
He doesn’t like Mondays but what really gets the goat of Boomtown Rats’ frontman Bob Geldof is famine in Africa. Fair enough, we suppose.
In 1984, the singer was watching a BBC documentary about famine in Ethiopia and was so moved by the country’s plight that he decided to mobilise the world’s biggest artists toward action. Having teamed up with Midge Ure from Ultravox, the two roped in a flurry of artists for Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas”, which was to become the biggest-selling UK single for the next 13 years.
Geldof was not satisfied, however, and the next summer he organised Live Aid, a worldwide relief concert screened to an estimated 1.9 billion people across 150 nations, who witnessed the world’s greatest artists – and the Boomtown Rats – sing their hearts out to help save a nation.
20 years later, Geldof resolved to change the world once more with Live 8, timed to coincide with the G8 conference and summit on the same weekend. Though the anti-poverty concert did not exist to raise money – rather it sought to change attitudes – it was a fitting follow-up that showed that Geldof hadn’t lost any of his ability to unite the world for a great cause.
John Philip Holland
If Ireland is to go eventually back to the punt then we demand that John Philip Holland makes an appearance on our currency, rather than that nun nobody’s heard of on the old fiver notes. Why the demand to honour Holland? Pfft, this guy invented the submarine.
That’s right; the stealthy torpedo-firing vessels are the result of a Clareman, as the Irish engineer was commissioned by the Royal Navy to develop their first-ever submarine, the modestly-titled Holland 1. Holland had previously designed a submarine at the behest of the Fenian Brotherhood titled the ‘Fenian Ram’, he eventually turned his back on the group after disagreements over funding.
One of Holland’s proudest moments later came when one of his designs became the first submarine commissioned by the US Navy, the USS Holland, which was purchased on 11 April, 1900.
Having designed submersibles for 57 years, Holland died in 1914 and was actually buried at sea inside one of his own submarine designs. Fair enough, that’s a lie – but it would’ve been pretty cool if he had been, right?
This series is brought to you by the new Honda Civic, which comes with the tagline “If we never venture into the unknown, how do we get anywhere new?” Here’s our review of the new Honda Civic.
