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.
Kevin Draper of the New York Times talks to Dion Fanning about how the sanctions imposed on the Kinahan gang will work and what boxing in the US and beyond will do now that the authorities have put a $5 million dollar bounty on Daniel Kinahan.
Alain Bertaud is an apostate. He trained as an architect and as a young man, worked with the renowned Le Corbusier. But over the course of a long career – in which he served as principal urban planner of the World Bank – Alain came to reject the architects' world view. Now, despite having no formal training, he could be fairly considered one of the world's foremost urban economists. In this podcast with Sean Keyes, he shares his views on what cities need from their governments, and the ways city governments get things wrong.
French people are voting this Sunday in the first round of the presidential election, with far-right candidate Marine Le Pen polling higher than ever in her challenge to the incumbent Emmanuel Macron. Dion Fanning asks Paris-based journalist Stephen Carroll and The Currency's French-born senior correspondent Thomas Hubert what is happening in a campaign overshadowed by the war in Ukraine and its consequences on the personal finances of French voters.
The Currency's Gaelic football analyst Paul Flynn and former Kerry great Marc Ó Sé discuss the chances of Kerry claiming their first All Ireland since 2014 and what Jack O'Connor's return - and the addition of critical members of the backroom team - has done for their chances.
Michael Horvath founded Strava in 2009 with his college buddy Mark Gainey. The duo rowed crew together in Harvard in the 1980s and they wanted to recreate the same feeling of community that they had in the Massachusetts boathouse for the wider public. Thirteen years later and Strava has changed the world of amateur sport, allowing casual athletes access to analytics previously only available to the elite. In this podcast, Horvath tells Rosanna Cooney about building the company, his decision to step back in 2014 and to return again in 2019 when Strava was at its lowest ebb, freshly determined to make it profitable and meaningful for athletes.
Johnny O'Reilly talks to Dion Fanning from Kyiv about the city's return to a kind of normality which may reflect some optimism or may simply be a sign that you can get used to anything. Meanwhile, just outside the city, the people of the satellite town of Irpin come to terms with the full horror of war. He also talks about his time among the war correspondents in Ukraine
Vladimir Putin’s war of choice has forced the West to confront questions that it has long avoided about its economic relationship with Russia. Decisions that would have been unthinkable before February 24 have been made at a dizzying speed and scale. The Western sanctions that have been imposed are the harshest ever imposed against a state of Russia’s size and power.
In this podcast, Ed Brophy talks to Nicholas Mulder, assistant professor in the history department of Cornell University in New York and author of the superb recent book “The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War”, about the use of economic sanctions as a form of war and their unintended consequences.
In 2014, drinks entrepreneur Pat Rigney put everything he had saved during his career to launch The Shed Distillery in Drumshanbo, Co Leitrim. Now, the business is turning over more than €15 million in revenues while its Drumshanbo Gunpowder Irish Gin is sold in more than 60 countries. It also produces vodka, whiskey and recently opened a €3 million visitor centre.
In this podcast with Alison Cowzer, Rigney talks about getting the business off the ground and his ambitions for the future. He also talks about his own career – from helping scale Baileys internationally to co-founding – and selling – the company behind Boru Vodka. He also talks about the future of hospitality after the pandemic, the importance of the brand and the secrets to scaling internationally.
The row over expenses between the GPA and the GAA has led to a media blackout as players and managers demonstrate their solidarity with those who aren't getting full expenses, but it underlines, too, the precarious nature of the GAA's most precious asset: its amateurism. As the demands on players grow, how long can the governing myth of the GAA be sustained? Paul Flynn, former Dublin footballer and former GPA CEO, explains the issues to Dion Fanning.
We're building about a quarter of the new homes we'd need to be building in order to fix housing, and we're already running out of sites. We need a new plan. We should make full use of our rail network. With a few investments, one rail line could be moving as many people as a forty lane motorway. We should start with the transport system and work backwards, because it's much harder to build a high-performing transport system in an existing city than it is to build a new neighbourhood around an existing transport system.
