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.
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.
The Ukrainian academic Volodymyr Ishchenko has dealt for much of his career with nationalism in Ukraine and beyond. He is part of this podcast this weekend, discussing the motivation of Vladimir Putin, why he feels Russian nationalism doesn't play a huge role in the career of a man who has been driven by cynical, kleptocratic politics and Ishchenko also talks about his own parents who remain in Kyiv. In the first part of the podcast, Johnny O'Reilly speaks to The Currency from Odessa about covering this story and what lies ahead.
As international sanctions target an ever-increasing list of Russian interests in response to the invasion of Ukraine, Thomas Hubert's reporting has traced €13 billion worth of Irish-domiciled assets to Russian firms on the EU and US sanctions list and Stephen Kinsella has assessed the balance of forces between Moscow's military might and Western powers' economic pressure. They join Ian Kehoe to discuss how this confrontation will play out and why Ireland finds itself at the centre of it.
After a harrowing week in Ukraine, two academics at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna spoke to Dion Fanning about what is happening in the country. Ukrainian Lidiia Akryshora and US historian Katherine Younger about why Putin isn't a rational actor and why there is no way he can achieve what he wants in Ukraine.
