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.
As he enters the sixth decade of his career in the energy industry, Eddie O’Connor is keen to open a new chapter with Supernode, the company he chairs and owns 50 per cent of. His plan is to transport energy over long distances from renewable generation areas like Ireland’s windswept seaboard to big urban demand centres across Europe. On this podcast, he takes Thomas Hubert from the geopolitical trends influencing climate action to the reality of technology deployment on the ground – and warns that obstacles to innovation in Ireland may force Supernode to emigrate.
Peter Oborne worked with Boris Johnson when the UK's prime minister was editor of The Spectator. He considered him a brilliant editor but he has in recent years chronicled his lies and evasions and the intersection between British politics and its media. In this podcast with Dion Fanning he discusses where Boris Johnson stands following the revelations about Downing Street parties last Christmas and speculates where the Conservative Party will go when they ditch him.
In his early twenties, Andrew Lynch launched a fashion show and established a business selling ponchos. He even considered becoming a sports agent. However, after his mother told him to get a “real job”, he entered the world of recruitment.
Today, his company, Mason Alexander, employs 45 people in Ireland and Portugal and works with a range of scaling young companies and blue-chip corporates. The company initially specialised in finance and legal recruitment but has expanded into IT, recruiting and placing people in pharmaceutical jobs.
In this podcast with Ian Kehoe, Lynch talks about the company’s journey to date and reveals ambitious new plans to launch Mason Alexander in the US in 2022. He explains why he does not fear failure, learning from mistakes and how the pandemic has changed the workplace and the world of recruitment.
In 2016, Stuart Lancaster returned to coaching alongside Leo Cullen at Leinster. It brought to an end a challenging period in his career. In this wide ranging interview with Paul Flynn he talks about the toughest moments when he lost his job at England, how Leinster and Leo Cullen have allowed him to regain his love of coaching and the curiosity that drives his passion for leadership.
Having lost its tax advantage, Patrick Walsh believes Ireland needs to develop a new economic strategy based around start-ups and innovation-led businesses. However, for that to happen, the founder and chief executive of Dogpatch Labs argues that the government will have to radically improve the suite of tax and policy packages available to entrepreneurs.
In a wide-ranging interview with Ian Kehoe, Walsh talks about developing Ireland’s start-up ecosystem across the country, the battle for talent, and what entrepreneurs can learn from the IRFU.
Walsh also talks about launching Dogpatch seven years ago, and how the co-working space and accelerator has grown to almost 40,000 sq ft in size over 3 levels. Having taken over the NDRC, he also talks about his plans for the national accelerator.
Manchester United appear to be on the right track with the appointment of Ralf Rangnick but in this podcast with Andy Green who was a vocal critic of the Glazers, he talks to Dion Fanning about the strategy under the owners and why they aren't going anywhere.
Working at the coalface of the office market, Andrew Lynch, the co-founder of co-working business Huckletree, has spent the past 18 months adapting, renegotiating, and trying to refine the Huckletree product. The company has five workspaces in London and Manchester and a 30,000 sq ft Dublin building also.
In this podcast with Ian Kehoe, he talks about navigating the business through the crisis, and why it is primed for expansion in the post Covid-world. He also talks about flexible working, the future of the office and creating curated eco-systems of companies.
After ten years living in the UK, he also talks about why he has just returned to Dublin – and why he expects many more to follow suit.
In this podcast, Dion Fanning talks to Jarrod Kimber, the acclaimed Australian cricket writer, about what the Azeem Rafiq story tells us about English cricket and more broadly professional sport.
As the dust settles on COP26 and the publication of the Government's Climate Action Plan, Thomas Hubert is joined by The Currency's columnists Ed Brophy and Stephen Kinsella and contributing journalist John Reynolds. From a common assessment that both high-profile events fell well short of the level of commitment needed to tackle climate change, they draw lessons for the changes now required of the state, businesses, voters and the foundations of democracy and capitalism underpinning their interactions.
