Don O’Neill doesn’t speak in slogans. He speaks in stories — slow-burning, salt-air-soaked, stitched through with a kind of quiet resolve. Raised in the small seaside town of Ballyheigue, County Kerry, O’Neill grew up sketching gowns in secret, dreaming of runways far from the Atlantic’s reach. But even as he dressed icons like Oprah and Michelle Obama, the pulse of home never left his designs.
His journey wasn’t a straight line. It zigzagged through kitchens and catwalks, through heartbreak and hard-earned success. O’Neill trained in design in Paris while working restaurant shifts at night. He spent years as Creative Director at THEIA, only to see the brand shutter suddenly — a moment that cracked open his identity but didn’t break his belief. In this episode of Arts Matters, he speaks with Alison Cowzer. Arts Matters is sponsored by HLB Ireland.
An inspiring careers day at school steered Belfast woman Aislinn McBride towards software engineering when she was 16. She now has 15 years’ experience under her belt at Kainos, a Northern Ireland-headquartered technology business expanding across 22 countries. One of her key challenges as chief technology officer is to replicate this lightbulb moment among potential candidates to broaden the group’s recruitment reach, she tells Thomas Hubert.
Fintan Drury founded a sports agency more than thirty years ago. In that time, he has advised the European Tour and worked on bringing the Ryder Cup to Ireland in 2006. In this podcast, Fintan talks to Dion Fanning about the LIV Tour and what he would say to a player if he was advising them when the Saudi-backed competition came offering money. He also talks about the ethics of sport in a complicated world and why this may be one instance where the choices should have been clearcut.
Sonia Neary co-founded Wellola with the aim of providing tools for patients to be monitored and cared for at home, rather than in hospitals. The company is now working with the NHS, HSE and VHI and forecasting revenues of €25m within five years. In this podcast, Neary talks to Rosanna Cooney about the future of healthcare in Europe, where trained professionals and healthcare settings are a finite resource under increasingly immense pressure.
The life and death of Joe Campbell - and his family's quest for justice - is the subject of a major investigation on The Currency. In this podcast, journalist Phoebe Greenwood and Joe Campbell's son Joe Jr talk to Dion Fanning about the case, the British government's plan for an amnesty for Troubles-related offences which might deny them justice, and how their father's murder affected the eight children of Joe and Rosemary Campbell.
Scooters are being hyped as an integral part of the carbon-neutral cities of the future, but they come with problems too. In this podcast, Andrew Fleury speaks to Rosanna Cooney about Luna, his Brian O’Driscoll backed software start-up that aims to solve safety issues with e-scooters.
Fine Gael have never recovered from their slump in the 2020 election and remain in the low twenties in the polls. Gary Murphy has written a piece for The Currency on the party this weekend and in this podcast he discusses the party's past and future with Fintan Drury and Dion Fanning.
David Jeffreys co-founded ActionPoint, a digital transformation business, in 2005. Since then, it has been behind the modernised passport renewal system as well as a technology driven passport system for cows. In this podcast with Rosanna Cooney, the Limerick native talks about Ireland's future as a leader in the digital economy, being acquired by Viatel and the future of the knowledge economy.
After the London private equity firm Elysian Capital made its first acquisition in Ireland three years ago, it rolled out its model where a local partner lives and works on the ground in each investment destination. Laura McCoy has been Elysian's Irish partner for just one year, and the acquisition of Fastway this month is her second deal in this job. She tells Thomas Hubert how she and the firm connected, and where they fit in the wave of private equity investment targeting Ireland.
Stephen McNulty founded Ambisense in 2014, when the cleantech label was putting investors off. The Dublin company develops analytics software to generate useful environmental management information from gas and water contamination data, and soon from flood defences. Having raised over €5 million to date, it now has a range of products ready to take on three key markets.
Pandemonium, by Jack Horgan-Jones and Hugh O’Connell, brings readers inside the rooms where these power dynamics played out during the greatest challenge the state faced. While the pandemic is the backdrop, the book’s real achievement is that it tells a story of how government works that will stand the test of time.
Ed Brophy speaks to the authors about what the book tells us about government and "the unknown man" who shaped Ireland's pandemic response.
