Thirty-two years after apartheid ended, black South Africans remain barred from living or working in the town of Orania.

Set beside the Orange River in the Karoo of South Africa’s Northern Cape province, the all-white settlement stands as a troubling remnant of the country’s era of state-enforced racial separation.

Built across 8,000 hectares of farmland and home to roughly 3,000 people, Orania admits only Afrikaners—the ethnic group largely descended from Dutch settlers who arrived at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652.

Frans de Klerk has spent most of his life in the secluded community and says he plans to remain there until he dies.

Now 26, de Klerk says he can imagine no better place than the isolated enclave. Orania was founded a year after Nelson Mandela’s release from Robben Island, just before white-minority rule came to an end elsewhere in South Africa.

“It’s not separatism as much as it is preservation, or just finding a place that we can simply call home,” he says. De Klerk rejects the idea that Orania is driven by white supremacist beliefs, describing it instead as an effort to preserve Afrikaner culture.

Still, reminders of apartheid appear throughout the gated town, from old-era flags to monuments honoring former prime ministers. The displays contribute to the unsettling impression of a settlement frozen in time—and determined to remain apart from black South Africa.

Critics have compared Orania with a modern ethnic Bantustan, the segregated territories created under Hendrik Verwoerd, the former prime minister frequently described as the “architect of apartheid.”

“What we are against is forced integration,” de Klerk says during a Zoom interview from his office. Behind him hangs the Orania flag, whose orange, white and blue design closely echoes the colors of the former republic.

South Africa marks Freedom Day each year on April 27, commemorating the landmark 1994 elections that brought the country’s first democratic government and formally ended decades of racial oppression.

Yet in Orania, which celebrated its 35th anniversary this year, many of apartheid’s symbols and ideas remain visible, roughly 380 miles southwest of Johannesburg.

“Orania is a town, certainly, but in a much more real sense, it is a project,” de Klerk says.

“A project for Afrikaners to build their own freedom, to be able to make their own decisions.”

The community is expanding and now includes two schools, a college, shops, bars, hair salons and numerous churches. It is also drawing more young residents, attracted by the promise of returning to their roots and rediscovering their identity.

Anyone seeking to move to Orania must first submit an application.

Applicants must be Afrikaner, speak fluent Afrikaans and have no criminal record to be considered for admission.

For many residents, Orania’s appeal lies in the sense of security it offers them from dangers they associate with life beyond the enclave.

‘There is a safety and security in this community that you will rarely see elsewhere in South Africa. In Orania, you are safe to wander the streets, even late at night. Children can safely ride their bicycles or walk to school and back,’ de Klerk says.

‘I see the interviews people do with residents of Orania, and many of them say they moved here for their own safety. I’ve heard stories about people’s houses being broken into, and afterwards, they made the decision to come.

‘I spoke to a lady this year, who was a victim of a farm attack in South Africa and is looking for solutions, and is considering Orania.’

De Klerk suggests Arikaners, who number more than 2.5 million out of a population of more than 60 million, are a persecuted minority.

As he speaks of politicians calling for Boers to be killed, he echoes the language of US President Donald Trump, who in February 2025 delivered a controversial executive order announcing a refugee resettlement programme for Afrikaners who he said were fleeing a ‘white genocide’.

Since then, more than 13,000 have moved to the US, according to state department figures. 

Arrivals are also accelerating, with more than 2,600 admitted in August.

But the South African government has criticised Washington’s decision to prioritise refugee applications from white Afrikaners, saying claims of a white genocide have been widely discredited and lack reliable evidence.

In February last year, a South African judge dismissed the idea of a white genocide as ‘clearly imagined’ and ‘not real’, and ministers have tried to emphasise that official crime data does not show farmers or white people experiencing crime at higher rates.

White South Africans still hold three-quarters of privately held land in the country, and control about 60 per cent of top corporate management jobs, despite comprising only 7 per cent of the population.

And while affirmative action policies have helped to develop a black elite and middle class, about 38 per cent of black South Africans are unemployed, compared with 9 per cent of white South Africans, according to official data.

Three decades after apartheid, the average white household in South Africa still holds 20 times more wealth than the average black household.

But de Klerk insists white people are the victims in the democratic nation. ‘The race-based laws of apartheid have certainly switched to a more discriminatory law system, discriminating against white people,’ he says. 

On Friday nights, the younger generation of the town congregate at Stokkies bar, where students from the enclave’s new training college gather for country music and drinks.

Nearly all its 250 students come from elsewhere, selected – as are all residents – on the basis of ethnicity, religion and a strong work ethic.

The college is planning for an intake of 800 students within four years, according to town spokesman Joost Strydom, noting the dormitories under construction.

But few are likely to stay after graduation: jobs are scarce and the biggest nearby town, Hopetown, with 10,000 inhabitants, is 25 miles away.

Nevertheless, de Klerk posits that within the settlement, quality of life is vastly better than anywhere else on the outside. 

‘You have the freedom to organise your own jogging club, go for a swim in the river, or at the swimming pool. 

‘Picnics, stargazing… there are sporting clubs, movie nights, the churches also have their own youth groups organising coffee [outings].’

Try as he might to paint the enclave as a quaint idyll, anybody who does not fit the white-only racial profile of inhabitants is likely to feel like an unwelcome outsider in the arid land. 

The town, which he says is supported by ‘strategic relationships’ with sympathisers in Belgium and American Republicans, has its own distinctive calendar, different to the rest of the nation.

April 6 marks Founder’s Day, commemorating when Dutch colonial administrator Jan van Riebeeck, working for the Dutch East India Company, established the settlement at the southern tip of Africa that became Cape Town in 1652.

The day was once celebrated country-wide as a national holiday, but was abolished by the new democratic government in 1994.

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The face of van Riebeeck also formerly adorned the national currency, the rand, which now bears the image of the first black president.

Other historical events are granted special importance such as the Day of the Vow, when a small force of Voortrekkers (people of Dutch extract) defeated a Zulu force on December 16, 1838, during the Battle of Blood River.

On a rocky hill above the settlement, the bronze busts of pre-democracy Afrikaner leaders preside over the town. 

Paul Kruger, JBM Hertzog, DF Malan, JG Strijdom and Verwoerd gaze out across the vast semi-desert of the Karoo, as vestiges of another age.

Disdained elsewhere, Oranians herald these men as heroes. 

Verwoerd, the editor of the National Party’s pro-Nazi Die Transvaler during World War II, is widely dubbed the ‘father of apartheid’ for his fundamental role in socially engineering the country’s segregation decrees as minister of native affairs in 1950 and later as prime minister in 1958.

He instantiated the system that banned marriages across racial lines, reserved many skilled and semi-skilled jobs for white people, and forced black people to live in what were called townships and homelands.

He infamously remarked in the 1950s that ‘blacks should never be shown the greener pastures of education. They should know their station in life is to be hewers of wood and drawers of water’.

The dismantling of white minority rule in 1994 ushered in a new era for South Africa, widely dubbed the ‘Rainbow Nation’, but for some Afrikaners like de Klerk, the change was threatening.

‘Forced integration forces people into not being able to freely or practically speak their own languages, or have their own heritage days,’ he says.

‘When one culture starts to accommodate another, then you have to take a little bit away from yours to make space for another. 

‘And then it is lost to history.’

He continues: ‘It’s a question of freedom of association. We feel that people should be free to associate with their groups – with their cultures – as far as they can.’

For de Klerk, marrying out of the Afrikaner ethnicity, or attending schools where other languages apart from Afrikaans are spoken, is destructive to his sense of identity, making its dissolution inevitable.

‘I don’t see Afrikaners as superior. I see the Afrikaner people as the culture that I’m in, and that I’m most comfortable in.

‘I would always choose to rather live amongst my own people than with others, but that’s not a superiority complex – that’s simply association and comfort,’ de Klerk says. 

White-only enclaves such as Orania and Kleinfontein, founded in 1990 near Pretoria, have met fierce criticism from across South Africa.

‘ActionSA firmly declares that Orania and Kleinfontein are not cultural enclaves but ideological fault lines,’ said the party’s chief whip, Lerato Ngobeni, in a May 2025 statement.

‘These communities are not heritage sites; they are sanctuaries of apartheid nostalgia, dressed up in the language of self-determination, but founded on the very bones of a brutal, exclusionary past.’

She warned that behind the fences of Orania and Kleinfontein, ‘children are not learning culture’.

‘They are being taught to fear difference, to internalise racial superiority, and to live apart rather than together.’

While the 26-year-old, who works for the Orania Movement, maintains that he is not racist, the town he spends his life promoting has a troubled and violent history.

By the end of the 1980s, the probability of losing governmental authority had already dawned on several Afrikaners, with some assuming impending democracy put their way of life at risk.

During apartheid, Afrikaners ruled South Africa. The regime repressed the black majority, while keeping white people protected and affluent.

The fear about becoming a powerless minority motivated a small group of Afrikaners – including Verwoerd’s daughter and son-in-law, Carel Boshoff – to purchase a strip of land in the sparsely populated Karoo desert, which would become their new homeland.

By moving in, the founders displaced a community of 500 poor black and mixed-race squatters, who had made their homes in the buildings of an abandoned 1960s industrial project on the southern banks of the Orange River.

According to Cambridge historian Edward Cavanagh, Orania’s genesis marked one of the final large-scale evictions under apartheid.

It was completed with beatings, pistol whippings and dogs, he said.

One 55-year-old black man and his wife, who have lived on a small nearby plot since the 1980s, told the Guardian they were once pursued and harassed by a pickup truck laden with Orania stickers when walking home after an evening with friends. 

‘Now you must run,’ he told his wife at the time, pushing her through a fence. ‘I’ll be behind you.’

But de Klerk even rejects that his people descend from colonialists, framing the Afrikaners as a precarious people in an echo of rhetoric from the Trump administration.

‘Throughout history, we are often described as a nation always fleeing, a people in flight,’ he says.

He is also hesitant to recognise the sanctioned racial oppression that defined apartheid – associating the system instead with an unsustainable period of ‘centralisation’.

‘There was certainly discrimination, but we can see that today as well,’ he says regarding the country’s racist history, quickly claiming there are more ‘race laws’ in present-day South Africa than there were during apartheid.

He believes the separatist model of Orania is one which other countries should learn from.

‘I do hope so,’ he says, when asked about whether other nations might introduce a similar model of ethnicity-based living.

‘I’m not sure if it will happen, but I do hope so, and if there are people considering it, if they are looking at the experiment or the blueprint, Orania is always open to visitors.

‘For people to come and see what we are doing, and how we are doing it, and how it works.’

For several years, I stood behind the counter of a Lotto kiosk at Midland Gate, a shopping centre locals had nicknamed Hellgate. Located in one of Perth’s roughest suburbs, it was the sort of place that could make Sydney’s Mount Druitt seem almost like a gated estate. From there, I helped sell Australians the tantalising fantasy of instant wealth.

As a teenager, I had an unrivalled view of people’s superstitions, financial anxieties and, occasionally, the extraordinary luck that genuinely transformed someone’s life.

The kiosk had its regular customers, including plenty of lonely older men. They would shuffle to the counter, ask me to kiss their tickets for good fortune and promise to buy me a car or take me overseas if they struck the jackpot. Others wanted my birth date so they could turn it into a lucky number.

Needless to say, my involvement was never going to bring them romantic luck.

I eventually stopped counting the number of customers who told me, “Make sure you give me a winner.”

My imagined response was always the same: “Sorry, mate. I sold every winning ticket to the first 20 men who used that line today.”

Besides, if I had known which ticket would win, I would hardly have been earning $12 an hour behind the counter while politely pretending their joke was fresh.

Still, the most unfortunate piece of luck I encountered at the Lotto kiosk involved a customer who would eventually become my frequently criticised ex-boyfriend.

He came in one day to buy a ticket and apparently took a liking to my smile — and to my rather memorable uniform: synthetic trousers paired with a loud patterned top that looked as though it had been bought by my nan at a Katies clearance sale and might induce a seizure.

I, meanwhile, was drawn to his enthusiasm for travel and his almost childlike excitement about life.

This was long before Tinder, direct messages or pocket-sized smartphones. Mobile phones were still the size of house bricks, so he returned the next day and asked me on a date.

Like so many lottery tickets, he seemed full of potential at first. In reality, he turned out to be a disappointing loss who cost me considerably more than he ever gave back.

Yet the most surprising lesson from my time behind the Lotto counter had little to do with lucky numbers — or with choosing a partner.

I was astonished by how frequently people won without even knowing it.

During slow afternoons, my colleague and I would search the bins for abandoned scratch cards. Many older Australians struggled to read the instructions or had difficulty seeing the symbols clearly, which meant potential prizes were sometimes thrown away.

Some customers glanced at their ticket, assumed it was worthless and discarded it immediately. Others scratched off roughly four-fifths of the card, decided the untouched section was unlikely to contain anything valuable and tossed the whole thing out.

We’d casually fish them out and discover $5 winners, $10 winners and the occasional ticket worth far more.

On a good day, we’d find hundreds of dollars’ worth of prizes that had been thrown away by people who spent every week dreaming of a windfall but somehow couldn’t identify one when it was literally sitting in their hands.

Yet even that level of self-sabotage paled in comparison to what happened when jackpots got really big.

There were the frantic jackpot days when people convinced themselves they had to buy their tickets early or they’d end up with the ‘bad’ numbers.

Maths has never been my strongest subject, but I’m pretty sure probability doesn’t care whether you bought your ticket at 8am or five minutes before closing.

Try explaining that to someone who’d been queueing since breakfast because they were convinced all the lucky numbers would be gone by lunch.

Lottery players are optimists by nature, but some treated random number generation like a Boxing Day sale, as if the winning numbers were sitting in a pile out the back and the early birds got first pick.

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There were customers who regularly confessed to accidentally running their multi-million-dollar dreams through the washing machine, leaving us to deal with mangled paper pulp and hoping the barcode scanner could somehow read a shredded ticket.

Nothing says ‘future millionaire’ quite like painstakingly piecing together a lottery ticket on the counter with sticky tape.

Then there was the syndicate drama. Office pools and family syndicates caused endless chaos.

Working the register meant listening to people argue over whether Cousin Bruce really paid his $5 contribution to the big rollover draw or watching someone try to sneak into a winning group after the numbers were announced.

There were also the regulars who became fiercely protective of ‘their’ terminal or the exact machine that printed their ticket.

If another customer stepped up to that particular register and won a small prize, they’d act as though their entire future had been stolen right out from under them.

Western Australians have a particularly intense relationship with lotto.

Maybe it’s because Perth doesn’t have pokies outside the casino. Maybe it’s Lotterywest’s near-mythical status. Maybe it’s the promise that every ticket somehow helps the community.

Whatever the reason, jackpots seemed to grip Perth in a way few other things could, turning otherwise sensible people into believers who genuinely thought the winning numbers might sell out.

And it’s big business. In 2025-26, Lotterywest returned more than $1billion to the community through grants and prizes.

Lotterywest, which has been around since 1933, has pulled off one of the great marketing tricks of modern Australia: persuading people that buying a lottery ticket is both gambling and community service.

We happily line up for a shot at instant riches while telling ourselves it’s all for a good cause.

So what did I learn from all of this? That the real product wasn’t a lottery ticket.

It was hope. Hope sold everywhere, but it sold especially well in Midland. 

This was a suburb where people joked: ‘What do you call a Midland girl in a white tracksuit? A bride.’

It was the sort of place where you couldn’t really call yourself a Perth local until you’d been barked at by the local icon Mad Dog while minding your own business.

But behind all the jokes was a community full of people who wanted something better.

Hope that next week would be different. Hope that debts would disappear. Hope that work would become optional. Hope that luck would finally call your number.

For a few dollars, a lottery ticket let people imagine a different life. Not forever. Just until the numbers came out.

Every week, they bought the dream all over again. Every now and then it paid off.

Most of the time, though, the dream cost more than it paid.

Which is why, looking back, I would have spent that weekly Slikpik money buying Vanguard ETFs instead.

Had I invested $7.40 a week rather than chasing Division One, I’d have tens of thousands of dollars more today.

Not quite a lottery jackpot but unlike Lotto, I’d actually be guaranteed to win.

Nearly two decades into his marriage, Michael Flatley still spoke about his wife, Niamh O’Brien, with the warmth and excitement of someone at the beginning of a romance.

“I’m very blessed. I’m in love with my wife, and she’s in love with me. We have a wonderful son. I don’t remember us ever having a bad word,” he once said.

When asked earlier this year about the secret behind their lasting marriage, Flatley offered a simple answer: “Marry the right person.” He believed he had been exceptionally fortunate to do exactly that.

As the couple’s 20th wedding anniversary approached, the famously theatrical Lord of the Dance was preparing a romantic surprise worthy of the occasion.

On October 14, Flatley and Niamh were due to celebrate 20 years since they married before a packed congregation in a church in Co Cork. The dancer had planned to surprise his wife by asking her to renew their vows.

“I have something very special planned for the 20th to renew our vows,” he revealed, only to realise moments later that he may have spoiled his own surprise.

“I shouldn’t have said that — my wife is going to know all about this! But I won’t say what it is and I won’t tell her. I’m the luckiest guy in the world,” he added.

But the milestone anniversary they had anticipated will now never take place. Only days before it, Niamh — the woman Flatley had known for more than 30 years, loved for two decades and called his “missing piece” — died aged 52.

Announcing her death on Monday evening, the 68-year-old performer said: “My heart is broken. My gorgeous bride of 20 years has gone to the Lord in Heaven.”

“She was the most loving mother, wife and person, and our lives will never be the same without her,” he continued.

Flatley’s life was surrounded by grandeur, from his spectacular dance productions and lavish properties to his considerable fortune and larger-than-life public image. Yet his marriage was marked by something far more private, steady and uncomplicated.

“They were just mad about each other,” a close friend of the couple told the Irish Daily Mail this week.

The friend described their bond as “a great relationship,” adding that Niamh was “always there for him, always behind him.” Although she avoided publicity and the spotlight, she was content to let Flatley embrace his flamboyant personality.

Those close to the Irish dance star also noticed a change in him once his friendship with Niamh developed into something deeper.

“He quietened down,” the friend recalled. “He is a family man and only had eyes for one woman.”

Their relationship was not born from a brief, dramatic courtship. Before she became Michael Flatley’s wife, Niamh was his fellow dancer, trusted friend and confidante. Their paths remained closely connected for more than a decade before friendship eventually grew into love.

Born in Kilbride, Co Meath, to Monica and Thomas O’Brien, Niamh started Irish dancing when she was just three. She went on to become a highly accomplished competitor, placing fourth in the World Irish Dancing Championships at the age of 17.

Her talent later drew her into the remarkable story that began in Dublin in 1994, when Riverdance appeared during the Eurovision Song Contest and transformed Irish dance — as well as the careers of those involved.

Riverdance quickly became a worldwide sensation, while Michael Flatley, its charismatic, bare-chested and swaggering leading man, emerged as the production’s first international superstar.

Niamh was part of that world from its earliest days and when Flatley left Riverdance amid a very public dispute the following year, she remembered the devastation among the dancers.

‘We were in rehearsal and everybody was distraught,’ she recalled in an interview. 

‘We didn’t know what was going to happen. He had been the driving force for all of us to keep up. He’d kept us motivated so it was a really horrible time for everybody.’

Niamh subsequently joined Michael in his new venture, Lord Of The Dance, alongside her sisters Aoibheann and Derval, becoming one of its leading performers as Saoirse, before also appearing in Feet Of Flames and Celtic Tiger. 

Over those years a close friendship developed between her and Michael, although romance was still a long way off.

Michael’s private life was considerably more turbulent. He had married Polish-born Beata Dziaba in 1986, with the couple divorcing in 1997, and later embarked on a high-profile relationship with the late Irish model Lisa Murphy.

He proposed to Lisa during a romantic trip to Monaco in 2002, but after an on-off relationship lasting several years they finally separated in 2006.

Through those years Niamh remained one of Michael’s friends and confidantes and, he would later admit, precisely because he thought so highly of her, she had seemed almost off-limits romantically.

‘My wife was the one that I had on a pedestal, the one on the show that I would never ask out,’ he recalled in an interview earlier this year. ‘Because she was such a lady, so classy, you know?’

There had, however, been signs that friendship might one day become something more. Michael recalled a party years earlier when he suddenly found himself looking at his longtime friend differently.

‘I noticed she was stunning – she took my breath away,’ he said of a moment in 2001. ‘We were at a party. I grabbed her arm and half-jokingly said, “Will you marry me?” She whispered into my ear, “If only you meant that”.’

By 2006, he did. Having split from Lisa and after more than a decade of friendship, Michael and Niamh’s relationship blossomed into romance and, once together, they wasted little time. 

He spoke publicly about the woman who he said had stolen his heart, describing Niamh as his ‘missing piece’ adding: ‘I’ve got the houses, the money and the success, now I want someone to share it with.’

Within months they were engaged and, in a flourish entirely in keeping with the Lord Of The Dance, Michael reportedly presented his bride-to-be with a huge diamond engagement ring worth around €250,000.

Then, on October 14, 2006, came a wedding that could hardly have been more Flatley.

More than 1,000 well-wishers gathered outside St Patrick’s Church in Fermoy, Co Cork, where Michael – himself almost half an hour late – arrived dressed in black tails, a white bow tie and a single red rose. 

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Yet Niamh managed to keep even the famously theatrical showman waiting, arriving in a Rolls-Royce Phantom in an ivory Badgley Mischka gown trimmed with vintage lace, reported at the time to have cost around €100,000.

As her father Tommy escorted her down the aisle, Michael struggled to contain his emotion and whispered to his bride: ‘You look absolutely stunning.’

‘I couldn’t take my eyes off Niamh,’ he said afterwards. ‘She looked absolutely stunning. I know I’m a very lucky man.’

Niamh, meanwhile, emerged from the church declaring: ‘This is the happiest day of my life. I feel like a real princess.’

From the church, guests travelled to Michael’s magnificent Castlehyde estate, where the celebrations were every bit as extravagant as expected. 

There was caviar, lobster, oysters and salmon, Champagne flowed, and fine wines worth a reported €1,000 a bottle were brought up from Michael’s extensive cellar. 

Around 100 chefs and staff kept the celebrations going, while chocolate dancing shoes were used as novelty centrepieces and, for those whose tastes were less rarefied, traditional fish and chips were also served.

The newlyweds took to the floor for their first dance to Frank Sinatra’s Fly Me To The Moon, before Michael later jumped behind the bar to pull pints for his guests and eventually joined the musicians playing flute as the celebrations continued into the early hours.

Within weeks of their big day, however, their marriage faced its first frightening test. 

In November 2006, Michael became seriously ill with a mystery viral infection and was admitted to hospital in London, forcing him to cancel the European dates of Celtic Tiger. Niamh, by then four months pregnant, remained at his bedside as he fought to recover.

Five months later came the happiest of reasons to be back in hospital when, in April 2007, following a long labour and Caesarean section, Niamh gave birth to their only child, Michael St James. 

Michael was beside her in theatre and emerged overwhelmed by the experience.

‘I don’t know if this is the greatest feeling ever but I can’t remember anything better, it’s incredible,’ he said. ‘And I love my wife more today than ever before.

‘Niamh is the real star,’ he declared at the time.

Fatherhood appeared to complete a transformation that friends had already witnessed after Niamh came into his life. 

Michael freely admitted that he had spent much of his younger years ‘partying, drinking and chasing women’, but by 2007 his ambitions were altogether more domestic.

‘Having a family has made me the happiest man in the world,’ he said. ‘I’ve always dreamt of being married with children, I was right to. Everything feels perfect— I’m so blessed. All I want is to be the best father and husband imaginable.’

While Michael continued to occupy a world of enormous wealth and celebrity, Niamh increasingly retreated from public life to concentrate on their son and family. It was a division that appeared to suit them both, and at the centre of their Irish life was Castlehyde, the magnificent Co Cork estate. 

Michael bought the estate in 1999 for around €4million and subsequently spent tens of millions restoring it to its former glory. 

The sprawling period house was every bit as lavish as one might expect of the Lord Of The Dance, whose shows have grossed more than $1billion worldwide and whose personal fortune has variously been estimated at between €230million and €420million. 

But in October 2023, the family were forced to leave the property after potentially hazardous chemical residue was discovered there, prompting a long-running legal battle over restoration works carried out over a fire.

Michael himself has struggled with some serious health issues in years. Having previously been treated for facial skin cancer and, in late 2022, received another devastating diagnosis.

He, Niamh and their son had travelled to Dubai for some winter sun before Michael underwent tests at the Princess Grace Hospital in Monaco, where the primary family residence is. 

Then, shortly before Christmas, his doctor telephoned and told him he had an agressive cancer that required surgery.

‘I was thinking to myself, “What have I done to deserve this?”’ he remembered. ‘I turned and there was Niamh. 

She was listening to everything because she loves me. Then she hugged me and everything seemed a little better.’

Michael subsequently revealed that he was in remission, later reflecting that, after everything his extraordinary career had given him, his greatest reward was ‘my beautiful wife and son.’

In recent years, Michael, Niamh and their son spent much of their time in Monaco, but wherever the family found themselves, it was clear that the three remained exceptionally close.

One of their final public appearances together came in April when they travelled to the Vatican, where Niamh, elegantly dressed in black, smiled for photographs alongside her husband and son as Michael had his rosary beads blessed.

Behind the scenes, however, Niamh had been living with a long-standing lung condition which had deteriorated over the past year. 

It has since emerged that she was due to fly to the United States to receive a lung transplant but died on Monday at Dublin’s Beacon Hospital before it could be carried out.

She leaves behind her devastated husband, their 19-year-old son Michael St James, her parents, sisters and a wide circle of relatives, friends and members of an Irish dancing community of which she had been part for most of her life.

Asked once what love felt like, Michael answered with a single word: ‘Heaven.’ And when asked to name the best kiss of his life, there was no hesitation either: ‘My wedding day at the altar.’

Heartbreakingly next Wednesday there will be no 20th anniversary celebration and no surprise renewal of their vows. Instead, Michael and Michael St James are facing life without the woman who had been at the centre of their family. 

But for almost two decades, Michael Flatley appeared to have found precisely what he had spent years searching for: not another leading lady, but the woman he wanted beside him when the curtain came down.