Every March, St Patrick’s Day transforms Dublin — but few people know the man helping to turn a single parade into one of Ireland’s biggest cultural and economic events.
Richard Tierney is the CEO of St Patrick’s Festival, the organisation behind Ireland’s national celebration. In thispodcast with Ian Kehoe, Tierney explains how the festival has evolved into a multi-day, citywide programme — with free daytime events, night-time culture and thousands of participants — while still carrying the weight of national identity at home and abroad.
Coming from a background in live entertainment and major commercial deals, Tierney was brought in with a clear brief: make the festival financially sustainable without losing its cultural soul.
As a co-founder and the creative director of Boys + Girls, Rory Hamilton has left his fingerprints on some of the best-known ad campaigns in recent years. But just where do the ideas come from? And how does a creative agency transform the wants and needs of a client into a campaign that can be rolled across multiple media forms? These are just some of the areas Hamilton discusses in this edition of Brand Matters with Alison Cowzer, a podcast series sponsored by the law firm Whitney Moore.
Debbie Byrne has two key roles within An Post. As managing director of its retail business, she is responsible for rolling out its suite of financial products. But she also has responsibility for An Post’s strategic brand development. In this episode of Brand Matters, she explains to Alison Cowzer the symbiotic relationship between the two roles. She also talks about transitioning the An Post brand, stakeholder capitalism, and the importance of doing the right thing for the right reason. Brand Matters is sponsored by the law firm Whitney Moore.
Michael Lynn was once the poster boy for the Celtic Tiger. He went on the Late Late Show and gave away an apartment. But as his story unravelled, he became, as Michael O'Farrell puts it in this interview, "the canary in the coalmine" for the crash.
O'Farrell talks to Dion Fanning in this podcast about his new book on Lynn and his journalistic pursuit of Michael Lynn since 2008.
In his book, Stakeknife’s Dirty War, the former H-Block prisoner, Richard O’Rawe, provides the inside story on Freddie Scappaticci. In an interview with Dion Fanning, he explores the many lives of Scappaticci, his own experience as a prisoner during the hunger strikes, and his views on Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams as they pursued peace, viewed as “treachery in a pristine sense” by many republicans.
Northern Ireland journalist Eamonn Mallie has just released a memoir, Eyewitness to War and Peace, and his interview with Dion Fanning explores the upheaval he has witnessed through a career covering the Troubles and the peace process, as well as the process of reporting on it. "With Michelle O’Neill and Emma Little-Pengelly at the helm, I’m hopeful that we’re on the right track again," Mallie says, and he explains why.
Graham Cawley co-founded Santiago Capital after three decades in corporate finance. In conversation with Thomas Hubert, he explains how the firm is carving out a niche by directing funds from wealthy clients and international institutional investors to traditional Irish property developers, and why it is expanding unsecured lending to small businesses.
“We have a shelf off the west coast of Ireland on which we can deploy offshore wind resources. Rather than taking raw energy out of our wind turbines and shipping it either through hydrogen or through large interconnectors into Europe – why would we not build the industry here where it’s close to the energy, and get the benefit from that?” KPMG’s Colm O’Neill tells Sean Keyes why he thinks it's finally time Ireland makes a pitch for heavy industry.
Estate agent and auctioneer Robert Hoban co-founded Offr in 2019 with the intention of making buying or renting a property as easy as booking a flight. Then, the pandemic shuttered the economy. It proved the business model for his online bidding platform, but seriously impacted his target customers - estate agents. In this podcast with Ian Kehoe, he talks about navigating his start-up through the pandemic, raising €6 million through three funding rounds, and his plans to bring the product to the US market.
In September and October, corporation tax receipts underperformed, leading to fears that the modern-day gold rush that has underpinned Ireland’s remarkable fiscal turnaround was coming to an end. However, earlier this week, the government unveiled bumper numbers for November, the most crucial tax month in the year. To discuss what happened – and what happens next – Ian Kehoe is joined by Thomas Hubert, who has spent years chronicling the vagaries of Ireland’s corporation tax, and the economist Stephen Kinsella. The trio also discuss Ireland's overreliance on corporation tax, the outlook for 2024, and a new report by the Fiscal Advisory Council that accuses the government of financial “gimmickry”.
Why are we as a society so obsessed with the provenance of things, but willingly deceived about where it ends up? Award-winning journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis became obsessed with this question and the global waste industry, often manned by bad actors taking advantage of an uneducated public. He talks to Sinead O'Sullivan about his new book Wasteland, which took him from the mountainous landfills of New Delhi, to the flooded second-hand markets of Ghana and to the sewers of the Thames.
