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.
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.
In The World for Sale, journalists Javier Blas and Jack Farchy chronicle the secret influence that a small number of giant commodity traders have on the world we live in, and how they use that influence on global politics to pursue massive profits. In this episode of The Context, Farchy talks to Sinead O’Sullivan about his efforts to unlock the secrets of the industry, and explains the inner workings of the billionaire commodity traders who buy and sell the planet's resources.
Family businesses can carry along successfully until they hit the skids and lawyers are called in. Emma Richmond and Cillian Balfe, partners at Whitney Moore, talk to Alison Cowzer for this episode of Family Matters about how legal services can benefit the structure and management of family businesses. Family Matters is sponsored by Whitney Moore law firm.
Ivana Bacik has been leader of the Labour Party for eighteen months but what has she achieved? She talks to Dion Fanning about trying to revitalise the Labour Party, why she felt she had to take on the leadership and her determination to go into government only if her party can make a difference.
In his 2018 book, Silent Invasion, Clive Hamiton investigated the influence of the Chinese Communist Party in Australia. It led to a significant push back from vested interests and he was barred from entering China. Undeterred, the respected academic and author began to investigate the silent control that China exerts over the rest of the work, an investigation that led to Hidden Hand, a groundbreaking book recently published and co-authored by Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg. “I wrote the book to show I would not be intimidated” he told Sinead O'Sullivan in this week’s episode of The Context. In the podcast, he takes Sinead through the journey of writing the book and explains how the Chinese Communist Party is exerting influence across the globe on a level few appreciate or truly understand.
The first Rugby World Cup in 1987 had gross revenues of just €4 million. In Japan four years ago, it was around €550 million. This time around, it will breach the €700 million mark. So, what is driving the commercial growth of the game, and how will it expand in the future?
In this podcast, Ian Kehoe talks to former Irish rugby player Rob Kearney and to Robert Brophy, the former CFO of World Rugby and now the Lead Adviser for Sports, Media & Leisure of Interpath Advisory. They discuss Ireland’s progress in the current World Cup, the opportunities for rugby to grow commercially and to expand into new markets, and the role of sponsorship in rugby. They also analyse the growth of the female game, the future of rugby, and whether Ireland can win the World Cup. The Currency’s Rugby World Cup coverage is in association with Interpath Advisory.
Vincent Carton’s family business Manor Farm is unique in Ireland. Eight generations of men led it one after another until it was sold to a Swedish PLC for €70 million. The question of what the ninth generation will do has taken years to determine. Carton shares some of the greatest lessons the process has taught him with Alison Cowzer on this week’s Family Matters podcast, sponsored by Whitney Moore law firm.
