Ed Guiney, co-founder and CEO of Element Pictures, has spent his career blending creative instinct with strategic acumen to shape one of Europe’s most influential film and television production companies. From early days making student shorts at Trinity College Dublin to producing globally acclaimed works like Room, The Favourite, and Normal People, Guiney’s journey is rooted in a deep love of storytelling and a clear understanding of how to bring it to market.
In this episode of Arts Matters, Guiney tells Alison Cowzer that he sees intellectual property ownership as the cornerstone of a sustainable industry and is a strong advocate for supporting emerging writers through initiatives like the Story House festival. While others speculate on the impact of AI, Guiney remains confident in the irreplaceable value of human creativity.
At an age when he could be retiring, tax expert Alan Moore has reinvented himself as a technology entrepreneur, rolling out a new AI-powered product that he believes can revolutionise the tax system. He has secured funding from SOSV and is raising additional capital. In this podcast with Ian Kehoe, he talks about the business model, the world of tax, and his career – from tax official to tax adviser to tax entrepreneur.
As a former government minister who had been admired as a schoolteacher for 30 years, Pat Carey’s distinguished career in public life could have been indelibly tainted by shocking and squalid lies. But he fought to clear his name, securing an apology from the Garda Commissioner and a settlement. He talks openly about the controversy, his sexuality, and his life.
Dr Tom Gernon is an Irish scientist who has dedicated his career to diamonds, figuring out where on the planet they are and how did they get there? He talks to Rosanna Cooney about his latest research which breaks down one of the great mysteries of the hardest crystals.
UCD war historian Edward Burke's next book, Ulster's Lost Counties, is a study of a forgotten aspect of Irish history: loyalism in the three Ulster counties that weren’t partitioned and where that population felt left behind. In conversation with Dion Fanning, he discusses the memory and mythology accumulated in Ireland's borderlands and in similar frontier regions elsewhere in Europe. They also talk about Burke's participation in the recent forum on international security policy, the threats facing Ireland and the gap between the protests that targeted the forum and how he thinks citizens perceive those issues.
Nobody knows the business of agent to the stars better than Irish pop's manager-in-chief Louis Walsh. In conversation with Sam Smyth, he looks back on the RTÉ payments scandal, the mutual need the state broadcaster and Ryan Tubridy have for each other and the central role the presenter's agent, Noel Kelly, continues to play in this equation. Walsh also reveals the outcome of a phone hacking court case he has taken in the UK.
Ibec's pre-budget submission is a counter-intuitive call on the State to spend money. But not to splash out willy-nilly, as the business lobby group's chief economist Gerard Brady tells Stephen Kinsella. Addressing capacity constraints in the economy, establishing a counter-cyclical infrastructure to exit the feast-and-famine habits of government capital spending and planning for the long-term needs of an ageing population are the key proposals they discuss on this podcast.
Mairead McGuinness is facing the final period in which she can push reforms through as European commissioner for financial services. As we get closer to European and Irish elections that will define her own political future, she tells Thomas Hubert that "nitty-gritty" measures to progress towards a capital markets union are her priority, defends the taxonomy of sustainable investments she has put in place and explains what the EU wants to achieve with sanctions against Russia.
Shane Kiernan and Stephen MacCarthy are co-founders of Recruitroo, a company tackling labour shortages with an automated online platform to recruit overseas workers. While they acknowledge it is difficult to raise money at the moment, they tell Thomas Hubert that investors still remember the value created by start-ups founded in the previous economic slowdown over a decade ago.
The DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson spoke at an event organised by Co-Operation Ireland last night. After the proceedings ended, the politician sat down with Tommie Gorman to discuss power sharing, the Windsor Framework, and North-South relations.
Emily O'Reilly marks 10 years as European Ombudsman as Brussels is engulfed by the Qatargate corruption scandal. As one of the top officials tasked with policing fellow eurocrats, she explains where gaps remain in the "integrity architecture" of the EU and why. The former journalist and Irish ombudsman also tells Thomas Hubert how she is approaching next year's European election, when her own position will be up for renewal.
