Actor Fiona Shaw was honoured in her native Cork last night as one of three recipients of the inaugural Cork Institute of Technology Alumni Awards.
Ms Shaw, born Fiona Wilson in Cork city, is a former student of CIT Cork School of Music and is one of the most critically acclaimed actors of the past 30 years for her work in theatre, film, television and radio.
After studying at Rada in London, she worked with the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1980s and continues to garner great reviews for her stage work.
She is also well known for her screen career, having starred in My Left Foot, Three Men and A Little Lady, Jane Eyre, The Butcher Boy, The Avengers, The Black Dahliaand, more recently, as Aunt Petunia in the Harry Potter films. Also honoured at last night's CIT gala ceremony at the Kingsley Hotel in Cork, which was hosted by broadcaster Leo Enright, were former Waterford Crystal chief executive Dr Paddy Galvin and Microsoft vice-president Robert Short.
Dr Galvin, who studied at the precursor to CIT, the Crawford Municipal Technical Institute, worked with Irish Dunlop and Guinness Brewery before joining Waterford Crystal while he also served as president of the Federation of Irish Employers.
Mr Short also studied at the Crawford Municipal Technical Institute and worked first with Digital in Galway before moving to Boston where he studied computer technology and joined Microsoft in 1988.
Mr Short has led design teams of as many as 750 people including the Windows design team to make PCs "plug and play". He is also the inventor of a dozen patents related to the interaction between hardware and software. Each of the recipients, who were selected by a judging panel chaired by CIT president Dr Brendan Murphy from nominations made by the CIT community, was presented with a sterling silver dish.