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.
John Looby's new book is "In Search of Returns: Making Sense of Financial Markets". Its an investors field guide, aimed at showing ordinary people how to take part in the financial markets. In this conversation with Sean Keyes, John discusses the most common investing mistakes, the payoff for getting it right, how his views have changed lately, and the route to 10 per cent returns. It concludes with a "spirited" discussion of the merits of cryptocurrencies.
Trevor Ringland doesn't believe the violence of the Troubles can ever be justified. As a former Ireland rugby international, he has experienced the support and affection from people all over the island but he's not sure if the speed at which some are talking about a united Ireland can ever make unionists feel welcome.
Ecocem, the green cement manufacturer founded by Donal O’Riain in 2000, has just raised €22.5 million from Bill Gates’s climate-focused fund Breakthrough Energy Ventures. From Paris where he has been working remotely since long before Covid-19, the Irish entrepreneur tells Thomas Hubert about his quest to decarbonise a heavily polluting industry, pouring concrete from the Aviva Stadium to European high-speed rail lines and dealing with impact investors.
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.
