Joan Denise Moriarty, founder of the Irish National Ballet, was born illegitimately to a Scottish earl and the daughter of a Lord Justice of Appeal, raised in orphanages and grew up semi-literate. She worked as a dance teacher in Cork where she was taken up by music professor Aloys Fleischmann. Together they developed ballet, attracting huge sponsorship but she was suddenly toppled from the pinnacle of Irish dance by the Arts Council, and funding for her company stopped.