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PORTLAOISE:FOR A whole hectic year he was probably the most famous Irish mayor since Tomás Mac Curtain, the mayor of Cork who died on hunger strike in 1920. As mayor of Portlaoise from June 2007 to June 2008, Nigerian-born Rotimi Adebari gave 500 interviews, most of them to foreign media, attended around 200 functions and made several trips abroad.

Feted as the multicultural face of what was once one of the most homogenous countries in the world, the demands on the time of Cllr Adebari went far beyond what one would expect of the mayor of a mid-sized provincial town.