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Sunday World
14-06-2025
- Sunday World
Convicted rapist found dead in canal ‘wasn't perfect', funeral mass is told
'He had his struggles, his set-backs, maybe even some regrets.' A convicted rapist whose body was recovered from the banks of the Royal Canal in Mullingar on Sunday was remembered as a person who 'wasn't perfect' at his funeral mass. Relating the life of Peter Dinnegan to the parable of 'The Prodigal Son,' Fr. Andrei Stolnicu C.C. said it wasn't a tale relating to a perfect child coming home to a perfect house. 'It's about a messy return, a broken road and a father who never stops watching the horizon. 'Today, we remember Peter, and let's be honest, Peter wasn't perfect,' he said. 'He didn't pretend to be. 'He had his struggles, his set-backs, maybe even some regrets. 'But if that disqualified someone from being loved by God, then none of us would stand a chance.' Among the mourners attending the funeral mass in the Cathedral of Christ the King in Mullingar on Friday morning were Peter's parents Paddy and Sally, his daughter Breanna and his brothers and sisters. Emergency services had discovered his body after they were called to the scene at the Royal Canal in Mullingar just after 6am on Sunday last. Gardaí are awaiting the results of a post-mortem which they say will determine the course of their investigation. A book of condolences set up online in the wake of Dinnegan's death had to be closed after messages referring to Dinnegan's criminal past were repeatedly posted online. Dinnegan had previously jailed for five years in 1999 after pleading guilty to raping a woman at Mill Road in Mullingar. His trial heard how the victim had met Dinnegan in a fast-food shop and they had eaten burgers together on the night she was attacked. They had not known each other previously. She told gardai how, when she was walking home, she noticed Dinnegan was following her and tried to run off, but he caught her. The victim told gardai that while she was on the ground being raped she had felt around for a large stone or rock to hit her assailant. Dinnegan, whose address was given in court at the time as St Joseph's Cottages, Mullingar, told his victim in court: "I am deeply sorry from the bottom of my heart for the hurt I have caused you." He blamed alcohol for his action and said he had not drunk since that night. Mr Justice Paul Carney noted that the then 23-year-old victim had feared she might not survive her ordeal and was now permanently psychologically scarred as a result. He accepted that Dinnegan's remorse was genuine and suspended the final six months of the five years due to his early guilty plea. This week, a garda spokesman said a post mortem will now take place and that investigations are ongoing. 'Gardaí were alerted to the discovery of a body in the Royal Canal, Mullingar, shortly after 6am on Sunday 08th June 2025,' a spokesperson for An Garda Síochána said. 'The deceased male was recovered from the canal by the Fire Service. 'His body has been transferred to the morgue, where a post-mortem examination will take place in due course. The results of the examination will determine the course of the Garda investigation. 'Investigations are ongoing.'
Telegraph
29-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Balanchine: Three Signature Works: boggle-eyed museum pieces that spark fitfully to life
Georgiy Melitonovich Balanchivadze – George Balanchine to the world – was the Russian-born choreographer of Georgian descent who gave the US its own lofty, leggy, sparkling strain of neo-classical ballet. He had an astonishing eye for choreographic geometry, while being perhaps counterintuitively flexible in terms of how he created his pieces. Just an 'awkward' 17 people in the studio today? Piece of cake – 17 it is. And oh, someone's now turned up late? Marvellous! Let's work that in too. Much like Britain's own sublimely musical genius-in-residence – his direct contemporary Frederick Ashton – Balanchine (1904-1983) is extremely difficult to dance: there is generally nowhere to 'hide' when performing his work. His tendency towards minimalist abstraction – with simple leotards and tutus, bare stages and plain cycloramas – means that only seldom will 'acting' will get you anywhere; technique and presentational star-power are all. A glaring exception to that rule about lack of narrative – in terms of Balanchine's surviving ballets, at least – is The Prodigal Son (1929), the centrepiece of the Royal Ballet's impeccably-chosen triple helping of Mr B, which closes this year's London-wide Dance Reflections festival. Not danced by the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden in more than 20 years, his final work for the Ballets Russes tells the famous New Testament story of the boy who leaves home with everything, is seduced and robbed, and finally returns home to his forgiving pa. Seen today, it comes across as a fascinating, boggle-eyed museum piece, the fauvist melodrama of steps and plot alike seeming to cascade down from Georges Roualt's school-of-Derain backcloth. Here, neo-classicism is almost entirely spurned for an often coarse, repeatedly 'line'-shattering physical vocabulary more of a kind with earlier, more famous Ballets Russes ventures such as 1913's The Rite of Spring. Time hasn't been entirely kind to it, even if Balanchine's choreographic inventiveness is everywhere – what presumably widened eyes in 1929 Paris looks almost quaint now. Moreover, the Father calls to mind Dumbledore, while the vividly etched pack of grotesque hangers-on seem close to the post-apocalyptic War Boys from the recent Mad Max adventures. Still, it's fascinating to hear Prokofiev cutting his already-sharp teeth as a composer of ballet music, while Cesar Corrales is a deranged but disciplined knockout as the Son, and on Friday night the work's 40 minutes whizzed by. A big disappointment, though, is Natalia Osipova's Siren, full of pelvis-jutting insolence, but absolutely not the irresistibly lithe reptile who leads the boy from the straight path. In marked contrast, the two works that here flank Prodigal Son – 1934's Serenade (set to Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings) and 1947's Symphony in C (to Bizet) – have dated not one jot; no modishly outré 1920s designs or drama here, and golly, how unshackled Balanchine seems to feel once he steps away from narrative. Of the Royal Ballet's renderings of both works on Friday night, my thoughts are very similar. Lauren Cuthbertson stood out in the earlier piece, Vadim Muntagirov and Reece Clarke in the latter: both projected across the stalls as if to the manor born. But the Royal Ballet seemed to lack the technical strength-in-depth, the complete, insouciant mastery of Balanchine's grand style, to make either Serenade's sublime mystery or Symphony's company-showpiece bravura really fly. Bad collective performances? No. But this wonderful troupe can, and should, do better.
