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.
Whether the EU can keep a united front in response to Russian aggression will also depend in large part on the outcome of this weekend’s runoff in the French presidential election. A President Le Pen would water down sanctions and try to rebuild relations with Putin.
To help us navigate the turbulent waters of European politics and policy at a time of war, Mujtaba Rahman talks to Ed Brophy. Mij is the Managing Director for Europe at the political risk consultancy Eurasia Group, and one of Europe’s leading political analysts. He leads and oversees Eurasia’s analysis and advisory work on Europe, helping clients to navigate the macro-politics of Brussels and its interaction with the member states across a wide range of policy areas.
Sinead O'Sullivan grew up in Armagh so it was a culture shock when she found herself in Harvard Business School, a training ground for American elites and "the home of unfettered capitalism". O'Sullivan learned the ways of American old money and, in a series for The Currency, wrote about investing in alternative assets like wine, art, watches, cars and farmland. In this podcast with Sean Keyes, she explains how the rich play a different game to ordinary investors.
“The freedom struggle begins again today against a foreign conspiracy of regime change,” Imran Khan tweeted as he departed office. He claimed that he was a victim of a US plot but as Professor Ayesha Jalal says in this podcast, he offered no proof. In this podcast with Dion Fanning, she explains why the US moved away from Pakistan and why the Biden administration were said to believe Khan was supporting Trump. Jalal also discusses what Imran Khan's departure means for relations with Russia, China as well as negotiations with the IMF, which had stalled.
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.
