In 2001, Peter McKenna was on the corporate fast track at Smurfit in the publishing business. But a conversation with mentor Paddy Wright planted the seed for a dramatic career pivot as stadium director of Croke Park. When he took over, the stadium was under construction and loss-making. Last year, it had annual revenues of €132 million and paid a €16 million dividend to the GAA.
McKenna still serves as stadium director but he is also in charge of the GAA’s commercial arrangements and corporate partnerships.
In this episode of Sports Matters, he talks about making the stadium as a financial contributor to the GAA, the decision to take control of the association’s streaming service, and the lessons from his career.
Sports Matters is sponsored by the law firm Whitney Moore.
The Irish Petroleum Industry Association is dead, long live Fuels for Ireland. The industry body representing oil importers and distributors and Ireland's only refinery has acknowledged that its members won't sustain their businesses into the future by selling fossil fuels. Its CEO Kevin McPartlan joins Thomas Hubert to discuss the Covid-19 oil price crash, new fuels such as gas and hydrogen, and his call for government to stop holding its nose at meetings with petrol station owners if they are to help in the transition to a low-carbon economy.
Jack Murray worked as press officer for the Progressive Democrats and as a special adviser to a number of ministers. In 2006, however, he launched his own business MediaHQ with the stated intention of taking the grunt work out of public relations. Today, the company has several thousand clients and its media contacts database has media intelligence on every journalist working in the UK and Ireland with almost 70,000 individual profiles. In this podcast with Ian Kehoe, Murray talks about the company’s 14-year journey and its recent expansion into the British market. He also talks about the future of the media, the importance of storytelling and his mission to transform how people connect with their audience.
Aidan Connolly is the chief executive of the Dublin agtech company Cainthus, president of AgriTech Capital and a member of the Forbes Technology Council. In this podcast, the industry expert explains that while the food system was ill-prepared for this Covid-19 induced crisis, it has also hastened the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence. Speaking to Ian Kehoe, Connolly also highlights six examples of actors in the food industry who have introduced AI, how this has accelerated their growth, or even changed the way in which they operate. Drawing from his international experience, he also discusses the opportunities for Ireland in the world of agtech and AI.
Jim O’Callaghan is one of Ireland’s most respected barristers and a Fianna Fáil TD. He talks about the ongoing fallout of golfgate, his ambitions in politics and career in the law to Sam Smyth. O’Callaghan also discusses how he is open to going into government with Sinn Féin, the identity crisis at the heart of Fianna Fáil, and his regrets about not pursuing his love of rugby more.
As managing director of Chevron Training, Karl Fitzpatrick runs one of Ireland’s largest providers of online childcare and healthcare programmes. However, the Wexford based entrepreneur also owns the Irish master franchise for a range of other businesses including Bricks 4 Kidz Ireland, Little Medical School Ireland and 4EverYoung Anti-Aging Solutions Ireland. In this podcast, he charts his own career and reveals how he manages his collection of business. He also talks about his role as an angel investor, his expansion plans and the impact of Covid-19 on his businesses - and the wider economy.
Most retail brands start off with a physical presence and migrate online. Gym + Coffee, the Irish athleisure brand, has done it in reverse – launching an online store in 2017 before rolling out a chain of retail outlets. However, Niall Horgan, a co-founder and chief executive of Gym + Coffee, says its online-first strategy has allowed it to scale during the current crisis. In a podcast with Ian Kehoe, Horgan also explains why he left a multinational career to help launch the business, and how it overhauled its supply chain in 10 days due to Covid-19. He also talks about the importance of community, brand and mission and reveals its strategy for international expansion.
Over the past year, The Currency has exposed the structures used by vulture funds to acquire tens of billions’ worth of distressed debt in Ireland. Thomas Hubert’s latest investigation into CarVal also revealed how profitable this business has been for the US private equity firm, and where its Irish-registered special purpose vehicles are headed next. From the policies that led to the mass securitisation of distressed debt to the 2016 reform of so-called Section 110 companies and its effect (or lack thereof) on the tax they pay here, and to the use of Irish vehicles to swoop on distressed debt as far away as Australia and China, Thomas joins Ian Kehoe to take stock on the presence of vulture funds in Ireland as pillar banks book a fresh round of loan impairments.
Over the past month, Investment Strategist John Looby has written a three-part series on what investors, policymakers and business leaders can learn from the thinking of the scholar and mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In this podcast with Ian Kehoe, Looby talks about the practical implementation of many of Taleb’s theories around probability, risk, and anti-fragility, and explains how investors can buffer themselves in an uncertain world. He also talks about what Irish politicians can learn from Taleb’s theories about the future, with Looby arguing that a significant policy goal should be winning the case with our EU partners for splitting the capital budget from the current budget, and funding the former with tailored, long-term debt.
With sport almost ground to a halt, the various Irish governing bodies have been warning about the financial impact of the crisis on their respective associations. In this podcast, Rob Hartnett, the founder and chief executive of Sport for Business, examines the business shock of Covid-19 on the GAA, the FAI, the IRFU and horse racing. Hartnett, whose company bridges the gap between business and sport, also talks about the impact on television rights, sponsorship and partnership deals, as well the new models that associations and clubs will have to implement to adapt to the new commercial reality.
US physicist Yaneer Bar-Yam has specialised in studying complex systems such as pandemics and financial crises. In January he wrote an influential paper with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of a best-selling book called The Black Swan, warning that the novel coronavirus emerging in China threatened the world. Bar-Yam has been paying close attention to Ireland's coronavirus response and argues that the best approach once the number of new cases has been brought near zero is to cut off routes for any fresh infection to spread. He tells Thomas Hubert: "You want to be as careful as possible to limit the possibility of starting a new fire and what you want to do is to limit travel as much as is reasonably possible and to quarantine people that arrive carefully so that they don't start a new outbreak."
