Mike Cronin and Mark Duncan’s new book Revolutionary Times looks at the revolutionary period in Ireland. In this podcast he talks to Dion Fanning about the stories we tell ourselves, the problem with reunification and why Irish history remains such a hot topic to debate.
Estate agent and auctioneer Robert Hoban co-founded Offr in 2019 with the intention of making buying or renting a property as easy as booking a flight. Then, the pandemic shuttered the economy. It proved the business model for his online bidding platform, but seriously impacted his target customers - estate agents. In this podcast with Ian Kehoe, he talks about navigating his start-up through the pandemic, raising €6 million through three funding rounds, and his plans to bring the product to the US market.
In September and October, corporation tax receipts underperformed, leading to fears that the modern-day gold rush that has underpinned Ireland’s remarkable fiscal turnaround was coming to an end. However, earlier this week, the government unveiled bumper numbers for November, the most crucial tax month in the year. To discuss what happened – and what happens next – Ian Kehoe is joined by Thomas Hubert, who has spent years chronicling the vagaries of Ireland’s corporation tax, and the economist Stephen Kinsella. The trio also discuss Ireland's overreliance on corporation tax, the outlook for 2024, and a new report by the Fiscal Advisory Council that accuses the government of financial “gimmickry”.
Why are we as a society so obsessed with the provenance of things, but willingly deceived about where it ends up? Award-winning journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis became obsessed with this question and the global waste industry, often manned by bad actors taking advantage of an uneducated public. He talks to Sinead O'Sullivan about his new book Wasteland, which took him from the mountainous landfills of New Delhi, to the flooded second-hand markets of Ghana and to the sewers of the Thames.
Gathered around a table in New York are journalist Sam Smyth, comedian Des Bishop and two of America's most illustrious lawyers, Ed Hayes and Barry Scheck. Together, they have a boisterous debate on American politics, the changing media landscape and the showmanship required to be a 21st-century trial lawyer.
John Hume was a man of contradictions. Hugely ambitious and with a vision for peace and unity, he could be difficult, cantankerous and his silences were legendary. Stephen Walker, author of a new biography, speaks to Dion Fanning about the criticism of Hume, his vision and the risks he took for peace.
Cars have promised freedom and mobility. However, according to the journalist Daniel Knowles, they have actually made our lives worse. In Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do, Knowles looks at the rise of the car and assesses the impact it has had on everything from urban planning to the economy and human happiness - or lack thereof. He takes readers around the world from Nairobi, where, despite the fact that few people own a car, the city is still cloaked in smog, to Houston, where the Katy Freeway has 36 lanes and there are 30 parking spaces for every resident. In this podcast, he talks to Sinead about why he wrote the book, and what needs to happen to reduce our reliance on cars.
CoolPlanet is in expansion mode again after the pandemic froze its core business helping corporate customers cut their energy use and carbon emissions. It now outsources the roll-out of those projects and focuses on the analytics software driving them - including to control new electric trucks specialised in mining, its founder and chairman Norman Crowley tells Thomas Hubert. He sees a decade of growth ahead in the need for decarbonising the economy and warns that Ireland is missing the offshore wind opportunity while protecting a type of livestock farming that has no future.
Justine McCarthy is one of Ireland's most venerated journalists. Her career spans four decades across a country that is almost unrecognisable from when she began as a colour writer with the Irish Independent. She talks to Sam Smyth about her new book, and a lifetime spent reporting from the inside the spotlight and on the dark corners of Irish society.
In 2017, Sideways Labs, an affiliate of the multinational giant Google, won a contract to design and build a neighbourhood on a prime 12-acre waterfront site in Toronto. It was to be a city based around tech: from autonomous garbage collection to a "digital layer" to monitor everything from street crossings to park bench usage. By May 2020, the project had collapsed. In Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy, award winning reporter Josh O’Kane investigates how Google moved into the physical world, and how the project came unstuck. In this episode of The Context, O’Kane also explains to Sinead what it means for tech, city planning, and democracy.
William Walsh has seen the evolution of the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) from an offshoot of Enterprise Ireland to a 250-strong state agency tasked with rolling out retrofits and electric cars to Irish households and businesses - among many other tasks. Now the head of the agency, Walsh joins Chief Economics Writer Stephen Kinsella to discuss the challenges of the energy transition, its benefits beyond climate change obligations, and the long-term political backing he needs to deliver change from a €600 million annual budget.
