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.
In 1989, Michael Knighton agreed a deal to buy Manchester United. The deal was for £10 million but it never happened. Instead he took a seat on the board and he says provided the club with the blueprint for its future commercialisation. But Knighton doesn't approve of what the club has become under the Glazers and says the resistance to the Super League signals another turning point in football
The Sackler family were great philanthropists. Galleries and museums had wings named after them. They were easily associated with their acts of generosity. But they were less public about their role in Purdue Pharma, the company that brought OxyContin to the market in 1996 and a drug whose availability was central to the opioid epidemic in America over the past twenty years. Patrick Radden Keefe has written the story of the family and how over three generations they shaped the way medicine and prescription drugs were marketed in the US and how that led to addiction and denial.
The idea for Eppione came in the back of a taxi. David Kindlon was an insurance specialist, while his friend Neil Fallon was an employee benefits expert. They decided to combine their talents to build a fully integrated HR and employee benefits software solution that could service companies employing between 50 and 2,000 staff. To help them build it, they brought on board a third founder, Ernest Legrand, a former IBM executive. Four years later, their HR software company has 900 clients in Ireland, the UK and Australia and is planning to enter the US market later this year. In this podcast with Sean Keyes, CEO Kindlon talks about the firm’s business model, its global ambitions and why it is different from other HR software tools. Kindlon also reveals how he convinced high net worth individuals, including Blue Insurance founder Ciaran Mulligan, to invest €1.25 million in the business, and details when he expects to go back to the market for further backing. He also talks about Eppione’s latest product, Screenin.me, which helps employers manage compliance with Covid-19 requirements.
When Fiona Edwards Murphy applied her knowledge of the internet of things to the problems facing beekeepers in her PhD, demand for her technology emerged before she even had a business. Four years on, she has raised €3 million for her company ApisProtect, launched the product in the US and is getting it ready for the European market. Thomas Hubert meets Edwards Murphy after Forbes featured her in the coveted 30 under 30 list to discuss the transition from academia to entrepreneurship, transatlantic business in a pandemic world and why she never wants to leave Cork.
Four years ago, Kilian Kaminski and two co-founders started Refurbed, an Austrian start-up now selling refurbished electronic products across Europe. Where competitors manage their own stock of second-hand smartphones, his company acts as the consumer-facing marketplace for products ranging from IT devices to coffee makers and electric bikes sourced from specialist technical partners. Refurbed recently set its eyes on Ireland, and Kaminski tells Thomas Hubert that it likes what it is seeing here.
Derek Scally's book "The Best Catholics in the World" examines the nature of catholicism in Ireland and looks at the end of that "special relationship" and what was left behind. In this podcast, Derek discusses what it is in the Irish nature that led to the Catholicism Ireland experienced and, with Catholicism gone, what has that nature embraced now?
Last weekend, some of the biggest football clubs in the world made an attempt to seize control of the game. Where did it all go wrong? Sean Keyes, Stephen Kinsella and Dion Fanning discuss the Super League, the lessons they could have taken from history, why it failed and how there might have been a more successful version of the same idea if the club owners had made a better effort of taking on the status quo.
Having begun his career as a management consultant with McKinsey, Patrick Coveney has spent more than a decade running Greencore. In a revealing interview with Alison Cowzer, Coveney talks about personal ambition, Brexit and his own future with the food giant. He also talks about scaling an Irish business globally, dynastic politics and his views on the Irish response to the crisis.
When the Lord Mayor of Dublin Hazel Chu announced her candidacy for the Seanad by-election, it exposed further fault lines within the Green Party. She tells Cáit Caden why she decided to run, even though she believes she cannot win, and her future in the party. Chu also discussed tensions in her party and her views on the contentious topic of CETA. Since Chu has entered public office, she has been a driver for integration and diversity. She talks about what she believes should be done, especially in education, to promote integration and her thoughts on the higher level in Irish requirement to become a primary school teacher.
Bernie Madoff's death this week brought back memories of one of the most far-reaching Ponzi schemes in financial history. Diana Henriques's book The Wizard of Lies told his story. She interviewed Madoff and, even in securing that interview, she experienced in a small way what it was like to trust Madoff and for him to betray that trust. In this podcast, she talked about how Madoff did that and how his Ponzi scheme appealed to people's anxiety rather than their greed.
