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.
Gathered around a table in New York are journalist Sam Smyth, comedian Des Bishop and two of America's most illustrious lawyers, Ed Hayes and Barry Scheck. Together, they have a boisterous debate on American politics, the changing media landscape and the showmanship required to be a 21st-century trial lawyer.
John Hume was a man of contradictions. Hugely ambitious and with a vision for peace and unity, he could be difficult, cantankerous and his silences were legendary. Stephen Walker, author of a new biography, speaks to Dion Fanning about the criticism of Hume, his vision and the risks he took for peace.
Cars have promised freedom and mobility. However, according to the journalist Daniel Knowles, they have actually made our lives worse. In Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do, Knowles looks at the rise of the car and assesses the impact it has had on everything from urban planning to the economy and human happiness - or lack thereof. He takes readers around the world from Nairobi, where, despite the fact that few people own a car, the city is still cloaked in smog, to Houston, where the Katy Freeway has 36 lanes and there are 30 parking spaces for every resident. In this podcast, he talks to Sinead about why he wrote the book, and what needs to happen to reduce our reliance on cars.
CoolPlanet is in expansion mode again after the pandemic froze its core business helping corporate customers cut their energy use and carbon emissions. It now outsources the roll-out of those projects and focuses on the analytics software driving them - including to control new electric trucks specialised in mining, its founder and chairman Norman Crowley tells Thomas Hubert. He sees a decade of growth ahead in the need for decarbonising the economy and warns that Ireland is missing the offshore wind opportunity while protecting a type of livestock farming that has no future.
Justine McCarthy is one of Ireland's most venerated journalists. Her career spans four decades across a country that is almost unrecognisable from when she began as a colour writer with the Irish Independent. She talks to Sam Smyth about her new book, and a lifetime spent reporting from the inside the spotlight and on the dark corners of Irish society.
In 2017, Sideways Labs, an affiliate of the multinational giant Google, won a contract to design and build a neighbourhood on a prime 12-acre waterfront site in Toronto. It was to be a city based around tech: from autonomous garbage collection to a "digital layer" to monitor everything from street crossings to park bench usage. By May 2020, the project had collapsed. In Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy, award winning reporter Josh O’Kane investigates how Google moved into the physical world, and how the project came unstuck. In this episode of The Context, O’Kane also explains to Sinead what it means for tech, city planning, and democracy.
William Walsh has seen the evolution of the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) from an offshoot of Enterprise Ireland to a 250-strong state agency tasked with rolling out retrofits and electric cars to Irish households and businesses - among many other tasks. Now the head of the agency, Walsh joins Chief Economics Writer Stephen Kinsella to discuss the challenges of the energy transition, its benefits beyond climate change obligations, and the long-term political backing he needs to deliver change from a €600 million annual budget.
In The World for Sale, journalists Javier Blas and Jack Farchy chronicle the secret influence that a small number of giant commodity traders have on the world we live in, and how they use that influence on global politics to pursue massive profits. In this episode of The Context, Farchy talks to Sinead O’Sullivan about his efforts to unlock the secrets of the industry, and explains the inner workings of the billionaire commodity traders who buy and sell the planet's resources.
Family businesses can carry along successfully until they hit the skids and lawyers are called in. Emma Richmond and Cillian Balfe, partners at Whitney Moore, talk to Alison Cowzer for this episode of Family Matters about how legal services can benefit the structure and management of family businesses. Family Matters is sponsored by Whitney Moore law firm.
Ivana Bacik has been leader of the Labour Party for eighteen months but what has she achieved? She talks to Dion Fanning about trying to revitalise the Labour Party, why she felt she had to take on the leadership and her determination to go into government only if her party can make a difference.
