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.
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.
John Devitt is the co-founder and chief executive of the anti-corruption campaign group Transparency International Ireland. He tells Thomas Hubert that the invasion of Ukraine was motivated by the Kremlin’s resolve to destroy a model where the elite was subject to increasing public scrutiny, and warns that Ireland will remain complicit in money laundering and sanctions-busting unless a joint effort between the State and concerned citizens tracks suspicious financial flows going through this country.
Professor of Politics at DCU, Gary Murphy and Fintan Drury, who worked with many politicians during a long career in communications, discuss the fall of Fianna Fáil and whether there is any chance of the party achieving relevance in the future.
Sonya Lennon has put in the hard yards. For three decades, she has worked in the fashion industry gaining fans and favour. What makes her remarkable is what she has done with that profile. She talks to Rosanna Cooney about making the decision to empower women economically and doing so in a practical hands-on way.
David McNair of ONE talks to Ed Brophy about food insecurity and the reality of the fall out from Russia's invasion of Ukraine for African countries who no longer trust the West and have been courted by Russia and China as a new front opens in a new cold war.
The sanctions placed on Roman Abramovich in the UK have created uncertainty about the future of his football club, Chelsea FC. Dion Fanning talks to the sportswriter Paul Hayward about the rise and fall of Abramovich, the money in the Premier League and where English football - and England - goes from here.
Dave Mulligan is a man on a mission. Having shaken up the drinks industry in Ireland with the lockdown hit Craft Cocktails, he is working on making Poitín the drink of the roaring 2020's. In this podcast he talks to Alison Cowzer about the bars of the future, how to retain staff during a national shortage and breaking into a bottled drinks industry dominated by global players.
