Hewson overcomes vertigo in charity abseil

ELEVATION: the Hewsons are famous for it, be it the name of a U2 tour or the top of a tower – where Ali wound up at the weekend in a fundraiser for the Chernobyl Children’s Project International (CCPI).

“It was much scarier than I thought it would be,” the elated mother-of-four confessed to the Irish Examiner after taking a wobble or two on her abseil down the country’s tallest building, the Elysian Tower in Cork city. Given her only dress rehearsal for the dizzying challenge was down the quarry in Dalkey, Co Dublin, she did remarkably well.

For 10 minutes, she hung precariously over the top of the 17-storey building, to facilitate photographers and a camera crew, before beginning her descent. Women watching from the ground below strained necks and eyes against the sun to see how the challenge was going.