Honor Fitzgerald interview, copyright Victoria Mary Clarke, 2003

Once upon a time, in a beautiful castle called Glin, on the banks of the river Shannon, there lived three little girls, each one as pretty as the next and all with luscious blonde locks.  Their daddy was the Knight of Glin, and their mother was a beautiful lady called Olda and their family had lived at Glin for as long as anyone could remember.  And when they were old enough to leave the castle and go out into the world, each of the girls had to decide what they would do with their lives.
Catherine, the eldest girl, inspired by the wonderful surroundings of her childhood home, went to London and became an interior designer, who also sells antiques.  Nesta became a talented gardener, just like her mother and grandmother before her.  Honor, the youngest, wasn’t sure what to do.  But we all have to find our path.  And so she went out into the world to discover what she could make of it.
Everyone wants to be happy and this is perfectly natural.  Honor wanted to be happy, too.  And looking at her life from the outside, it would appear that she had every reason to be happy.  To be ecstatic, even.  Because while most of us are in constant pursuit of youth and beauty and big houses and even bigger houses and fame and status and glamour, Honor had been accustomed to all of those things.  And didn’t need to seek them out.
But happiness does not necessarily come from the things that we think it comes from, from being beautiful to look at, for instance or from living in a beautiful house.  Marilyn Monroe was beautiful, blonde and rich and she died drugged and lonely.   Princess Diana was blonde, beautiful, and married to a Prince and we all know how unhappy she was.  So it wasn’t a given that Honor would be happy. Like anyone else, rich or poor, fat or thin, pretty or plain, Honor had to seek out happiness and when she found it, it wasn’t in the places that she had been expecting to find it.  For a while, she wondered if she would find it at all.
Today, looking at a picture of Honor, with hair like Gwyneth Paltrow and legs like Jerry Hall, sitting astride a Harley, she radiates glamour.  And that girl on the bike seems to say ‘I have everything I could want in life, I am just exactly who and what I want to be’.  She could be the envy of the rest of us, with her fairytale life.  But is life ever as good as it looks in the pages of a glossy magazine or in a Sunday newspaper?  I had lunch with Honor, to find out for myself, at her Dublin home, in Waterloo road.
 It was pissing rain and miserable and I was utterly bedraggled, as I arrived.  Hoping I wouldn’t be underdressed, with my soggy jeans.  Honor answered the door with a grin, also in jeans and without the blow-dried hairdo from the photo.  Looking gorgeous.  And asked me if I like the weather.  She’s so happy these days, she enjoys the rain, likes getting soaked in it, on days like this one.  ‘Do you like  quail?’ she asked me, cheerfully.  ‘Mummy and Daddy have eaten everything else.  I was always terrified of them, as a child, but I can eat them now, if you can.”
As I bit hungrily into the body of a small bird,  Honor put the finishing touches to a salad and offered me a beer.  The kitchen, where we ate was cosy and warm and I asked her if people expect her to be more affected, because of who she is.  She doesn’t know what people expect, she said.  But what you see is what you get.  And you can think what you like about it.
At the age of eleven, in the interests of acquiring a good education, Honor and her sisters were sent to boarding school in England.  To Cranborne Chase, a Palladian  mansion, in the English countryside,
‘Loads of beautiful girls in mini-skirts with long hair  in the most picturesque and dramatic place you could imagine.  And you could basically do whatever you wanted, we got no education!’
  There followed a spell at Bryanston, which was another very liberal school, but more academic.  And for the A levels, she lived with family friends in London,- with Oswald Moseley’s  son, Nicolas , with some artists in Maida Vale, and with her grandmother in Belgravia.  After school, having been interested in art from an early age, she studied art history at Trinity and then returned to London, to live on Portobello road.  Portobello was the absolute hippest of the hip places to be in the world at that time and Honor lived with some of the most chic and gorgeous girls in London, including Poppy Lloyd and Iris Palmer.  Iris was modelling and fast becoming famous and the girls lived a life that most people only read about in magazines like ID and The Face, the very cutting edge of fashionable.  Models in mainstream magazines merely imitated them. Honor studied photography, and worked for a new magazine called ‘Cheap Date’.  It was a dream life, in theory, but there was something missing.   It was trendy, she says, but it was superficial.  The same people talking the same nonsense and posing.  It never changed and it wasn’t happiness.  So Honor packed her bags, at the age of twenty two, having done London and done trendy and returned to Glin.
Being back in Ireland involved a great deal of partying, which was tremendous fun.  And there was modelling for Lainey Keogh, along with her friends.
All your friends are very beautiful looking,  I noted.  Was that a conscious choice?
‘It’s really odd.  All my friends are people I’ve known since I was a kid, so it’s not a conscious choice!  I met Sarah and Cha Cha and Suki and Lara at boarding school in Bray.  That’s one of the main reasons why I did decide to come back and live here, apart from Glin, because a lot of my friends were here.’
Were you not tempted to hang out with ugly fat girls, so you could have the pick of all the guys?  I asked.
‘That’s a good idea!’ she giggled.  ‘No, the idea didn’t enter my head.  Maybe I’m attracted to beauty.  But they were the only people I knew!’ 
  But the modelling and the partying were not food for the soul.
‘You can’t do that forever,’Honor says.  ‘And if you do think you can, and you try it, you get very depressed.’
There came a time of crisis, a time to review her priorities and a time to call a halt to the partying.  And to figure out what to do with her life.
‘My friend Patricia was starting her own public relations company and she offerred me a job.  I didn’t even know what public relations meant, but I realised  after doing it that it was what I had always done, as a child.  We always had visitors coming to stay at the castle, when we were children and it was our job to make them feel welcome.  So it came naturally to me.’
The job was easy to do, but it wasn’t satisfying.  Honor was still searching for something that would give her life meaning and purpose.  And she felt like a dilettante, trying everything, never sure what to stick with.  But she stuck with PR.  And this year, everything changed.
‘We started getting accounts that interested me, like Daddy’s book about Irish painters.  So not only was I promoting something that I really wanted to promote, but also I was meeting fascinating people.  Becoming involved in that literary and artistic world was very fulfilling for me.  I felt like I was at home in that world, because I had grown up with it and I had studied art history’
The Knight of Glin is the president of the Irish Georgian Society, which was started by Desmond and Mariga Guinness.  When they started it, Desmond and Mariga were young, beautiful, rebellious people.   The Georgians have continued to do wonderful work, but they have been lacking new blood of late.  Honor has taken up the challenge of promoting the Society to a new generation of enthusiasts.  And as the recent photograph of her on her bike demonstrates, she brings a substantial injection of glamour, which is attracting attention and interest from younger people.  And at the ripe old age of twenty seven, she has found her calling in life, she has finally discovered the passion and fulfilment that she had been seeking.
‘I want publicise it in a way that would be interesting to younger people.  I feel that I can change it, because when I tell people about it, they are really interested.  The next step is just getting them to come along.  Otherwise everyone will die off and that will be it!’
Other projects that she has been publicising include the Blue Book and the World Monument Fund. 
‘Two sites were chosen in Ireland, Headfort House and Athassel Abbey.  They were chosen alongside places like the Great Wall of China and Shackelton’s hut, it’s quite amazing,’ she informs me.  And as her face lights up, she reminds me of her father, who glows when you get him on the subject of beautiful buildings.
Is there a clash between the new generation of Georgians and the previous generation?  I asked.
‘There is a little bit of a clash, there’s no denying that.  But my Dad always like s to see new blood coming in and of course there is room for new ways of thinking.’
After telling me more about her projects, she drew breath. 
‘Gosh I’m exhausted!”
What about your personal life?  I asked.
‘What aspects of my personal life?’ she responded, warily.
 ‘Is it as fulfilling?’ I asked.  ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’  She relaxed and beamed at me.
‘Oh, yes I have a wonderful boyfriend! ’
The last time we had discussed boyfriends had been over a year ago, this week.  Honor had been single for a year, at that time and was lamenting the lack of a man.
‘I was getting fed up, because all my friends were having children,’ she said.  ‘My best friend Sinny Ryan got married and had a child, Jasmine Guinness had a kid, loads of my friends.  Poppy  Lloyd got married, out of the blue!  And it’s great to be free and single and you get a lot more done, but I was thinking Gosh, is it ever going to happen to me?  And I found Dublin particularly difficult, because I really couldn’t see anyone at all who I fancied!  There was absolutely no-one.  Mum and Dad were saying Oh God, you’re going to have to go abroad to find a man.’
At the time of our conversation, I had been experimenting with something called Creative Visualisation, which is where you imagine the thing that you want and visualise it regularly and draw it into your life.
‘  And then just after you taught me the visualisation  which I did, it happened!’ she said, incredulously.   ‘I remember walking away from our conversation saying to myself ‘I wonder if I could just visualise  one?’  And it literally happened two weeks later.’
Wow!  I said, impressed.  Can I put that in the article?
‘Yes, you can,’ she said, enthusiastically. ‘ I visualised a man!  In all honesty, I did it!  Suddenly Ricky came along.  In a ball of fire!  We had a passionate time.  I fell madly in love and now I’m really happy and I’ve been with him for a year!’
Ricky O Neill works in the music business and they are, she says, having a ball together.
‘  We go on road trips, we go to Sligo, down to West Cork, Kerry.  We’re always driving around the country having a laugh.  So I’m at a really good stage in my personal life!’
As we wrapped up our conversation, Honor confessed that although she is passionate about promoting the Georgian Society and the Blue Book and all her other projects, she’s embarrassed about the attention.
‘Isn’t it awful for you to have to write about me?’ she asked.  ‘It’s quite embarrassing, really.  People will be wondering who the f… is this girl?  What did she do?  She lived in a castle, so what?  This silly girl, who does she think she is?   But the thing is, I am trying to do something I believe in, I’m trying to do the best I can, so they can all f… off!’
I agreed with her.  I admired her spirit and her commitment and her passion and I wished her well.  And I joined the Irish Georgian Society immediately.
Irish Georgian Society, 74 Merrion Square, Dublin 2, 01 676 7053