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NATIONAL PARTY ON THE RUN

Date: April 6, 2023 -

After the fracas in Fermanagh, when antifascists confronted National Party (NP) members at their ard fheis in November, Goldhawk wonders whether, despite fighting talk, they have thrown in the towel. At its recent ard fheis, leader Justin Barrett claimed the NP only wanted a calm and quiet debate but “if they want the other way,… Read more »

GOD’S CREATURES

Date: April 6, 2023 -

FITTINGLY FOR a movie set in a rural fishing village, God’s Creatures arrived on a tidal wave of hype now standard for any Paul Mescal film. This time, the golden boy of Irish cinema plays Brian, a moody young man whose return from Australia to his close-knit Kerry village sparks major drama, which unfortunately unfolds… Read more »

MI5’s BENIGN ROLE IN IRELAND

Date: April 6, 2023 -

THE NEW book by veteran British author and broadcaster Peter Taylor, Operation Chiffon, has much to say about MI5’s activities in Ireland. It also includes a claim by one spook, ‘Robert’, of how he and other British agents helped to advance the peace process. Taylor’s book does not include one interesting story, which has been… Read more »

ONLY OUR RIVERS RUN FREE

Date: April 6, 2023 -

A PLANNING row that began in 2012 over an Athlone marina has turned into a major confrontation involving Waterways Ireland (WI), Westmeath County Council, litigation and hearings at the Oireachtas joint committee on public petitions. Lakeside Marina owner Michael Barrett is rather cheesed off because since 2011 he has spent a lot of moolah negotiating… Read more »

NEW IRA HASN’T GONE AWAY

Date: April 6, 2023 -

In the last few years, a number of militant dissident republican groups have announced ceasefires or merely faded away. The Republican Network for Unity, Republican Sinn Féin and 32 County Sovereignty Movement continue to exist but have been unable to develop a political project beyond interpreting the actions of armed republicans. However, when MI5 released… Read more »

THE HOT AIR BRIGADE

Date: April 6, 2023 -

What I can say is that it’s indeed the preparation of what we call here the newsroom of the future. How Mediahuis Ireland CEO Peter Vandermeersch explains the redundancies being sought at the Independent group titles, Business Post We’d never eaten in either restaurant before, so when the window for February bookings opened on December… Read more »

GOOD UDA V BAD UDA

Date: April 6, 2023 -

THERE’S Yet another so-called ‘loyalist feud’, one of many that have erupted over the past 25 years, but this time there’s a difference. It’s not happening in the back streets off Belfast’s Shankill Road or the impoverished housing estates of loyalist Larne or Carrickfergus. It’s in prosperous north Down – Bangor, Donaghadee, Newtownards – where… Read more »

NEUTRALITY: THE FINAL PUSH

Date: April 6, 2023 -

THE GOVERNMENT has finally decided to launch a ground offensive against neutrality with a series of discussions or “forums” on the issue later this year led by the foreign and defence minister, Tánaiste Micheál Martin. The actual content of Irish neutrality has been hollowed out in recent years with membership of Pesco and various Nato… Read more »

FREE FRANCE!

Date: April 6, 2023 -

FORMER BRITISH Labour MP, now Baroness Kate Hoey (courtesy of then UK prime minister Boris Johnson in 2020) has enraged even those who normally agree with her hard-line unionist views. During the recent House of Lords debate on the Stormont brake, Hoey described those MLAs who would accept the new framework deal on the assembly… Read more »

POLLS SPELL DISASTER FOR FF

Date: April 6, 2023 -

ONCE AGAIN, the media fixation on the latest poll is on how Sinn Féin compares with both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. But the existential competition between the latter two parties is the really historic battle being played out in front of everyone and the ongoing polls have for some time now indicated that FF… Read more »

BERTIE TO FIX IT FOR SF/FF COALITION?

Date: April 6, 2023 -

WHAT SCHEMING object has the most cunning one in mind when he tells Fianna Fáil and its leader, Tánaiste Micheál Martin, that he should accept not only a coalition deal with Sinn Féin but also a subsidiary position in such a government? Bertie Ahern does not make pronouncements of such weight without a clear goal… Read more »

‘EXTENSIVE’ CUTS AT MEDIAHUIS

Date: April 6, 2023 -

THE JOB cuts and restructuring announced last week by Mediahuis editor-in-chief Cormac Bourke and chief executive Peter Vandermeersch gave quite a different vision of the future of Irish newspapers’ than last year. Vandermeersch said that, as the changes would be “extensive”, there was a chance the company would seek compulsory cuts as well as voluntary… Read more »

‘IT’ GOES PALE GREEN

Date: April 6, 2023 -

IT IS only fair and fitting that long-time news editor of the Irish Times, Mark Hennessy, should be succeeded in that onerous post by one Simon Carswell. Not only has Simon filled the position of public affairs correspondent with distinction at the newspaper but he also performed well as the IT’s man in Washington. Carswell… Read more »

ROUND UP THE USUAL LOBBYISTS

Date: April 6, 2023 -

‘ROUNDUP’ SEASON is approaching – that time of year when Ireland’s verges, parks, playgrounds and farmland are doused in toxic chemicals that trash biodiversity, reduce insect numbers and cause cancer in humans. Also approaching is a historic moment in Brussels when the king of weedkillers could be banned across the EU. The licence to sell… Read more »

JOHN THOMAS GALLAGHER’S €10M PILE

Date: April 6, 2023 -

GOLDHAWK’S EYE was caught by a puff piece in the Irish Times last week about a property outside Kilrush, Co Clare, that has just come on the market with an eye-watering €9.75m price tag. Although the owner of this unusual property was not named, it turns out to be an American millionaire based in Switzerland… Read more »

AINTREE’S GREEN TINGE

Date: April 6, 2023 -

IRISH-TRAINED horses have won the last four runnings of the Aintree Grand National and it looks short odds that they will make it five in a row in the world-famous race in Liverpool next week. With a maximum field of 40 runners permitted to take part, 30 of the top 40 horses in the weights… Read more »

NO LIFE IN THE PARK

Date: April 6, 2023 -

THE INCONSISTENCY of race-day stewards was evident again recently after a valuable Grade 3 novice chase in Limerick. The race in question was won by the 11/8 favourite Thedevilscoachman, trained for JP McManus by Noel Meade, but it was the performance of the third horse – Life In The Park – that certainly caught the… Read more »

ITHAKA’S GAMBLE

Date: April 6, 2023 -

WITH RONAN McNally’s imminent appeal hearing over his 12-year suspension, an ex-horse of his, Ithaka, landed a tidy gamble in England recently. The horse is now in the care of little-known trainer Ryan Potter and was having his fourth start for new connections. Although he had been beaten out of sight at big odds on… Read more »

O’LEARY’S NAMING GAME

Date: April 6, 2023 -

MICK O’LEARY performed a U-turn last year by investing in some young national hunt horses to be trained by Willie Mullins, one of which was a three-year-old gelding by Blue Bresil (the sire of the mighty Constitution Hill), which Mullins bought at the Derby Sale at Tattersalls Ireland for €170,000. At some stage since then,… Read more »

VOL 41 NO 07

Date: April 6, 2023 -

CHASING ‘BACHELOR’S WALK’

Date: April 6, 2023 -

DOCUMENTS RELEASED to Goldhawk reveal the pressure arts minister Catherine Martin came under in 2021 to come up with the readies to enable the National Gallery of Ireland (NGI) to acquire Jack B Yeats’s Bachelor’s Walk, In Memory (1915), which had been on loan there since 2009 – an arrangement that allowed the lucky owner… Read more »

FLUTTER ENTERTAINMENT’S DANGEROUS US BET

Date: April 6, 2023 -

PETER JACKSON is preparing to seek an additional listing for Flutter Entertainment (owner of Paddy Power) in the US, with a view to eventually migrating the company’s primary listing to New York. While the announcement has generated a fair degree of hoopla here, Moneybags wonders if the move could blow up in the gambling giant’s… Read more »

KENMARE RESOURCES SHARES COULD RISE TO €20

Date: April 6, 2023 -

TWO YEARS ago (see The Phoenix 7/5/21), Moneybags noted that Kenmare Resources shareholders should be happy to “sit tight for the next 12 months awaiting the impressive results set to be delivered to shareholders”. Today the mining company is throwing off money and is debt free but the share price has barely moved. Is this… Read more »

MICHAEL WOODLOCK’S WOES

Date: April 6, 2023 -

GOLDHAWK WAS interested to see his old pal, Michael Woodlock (whose brother-in-law was former Fianna Fáil North Tipp TD Michael O’Kennedy), generating headlines last month. The Clonmel-based businessman was fined €15,000 by the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) after the adjudicating officer found that discrimination had taken place against a tenant in one of Woodlock’s properties…. Read more »

GOD’S FEATURES

Date: April 6, 2023 -

FOLLOWING THE Oscars hype in Ireland, man of the moment Paul Mescal pops up on screen again with God’s Creatures (see review p22), the latest release to benefit from Irish taxpayers. Directed by Americans Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer, and produced by London-based Fodhla Cronin O’Reilly, the film was released by US backer and… Read more »

GALLAGHER’S INTERNATIONAL FLAVOUR

Date: April 6, 2023 -

ELSEWHERE IN this issue (see p18) Goldhawk examines the story behind a remarkable property on the Clare coast on the market with a near €10m price tag. It is owned by one John Thomas Gallagher, who splits his time between Ireland and Switzerland. The wealth adviser and finance expert has presumably had a rocky 12… Read more »

SUSAN BERGIN’S WINNING BOARD MEMBERS

Date: April 5, 2023 -

AT LAST, the 2021 annual report of Susan Bergin’s Screen Ireland (SI) board has appeared in a discreet corner of the agency website. In her introduction, Susan Bergin refers to the sector developing “in a way that is transparent, fair and open”. Perhaps it is in this spirit that the question of SI board members’… Read more »

TECH ENERGY CUTS?

Date: April 5, 2023 -

“We have placed Amazon in energy sobriety because we are looking for billions to finance pensions and we believe this money is there.” So said Claude Etchelamendy of French trade union CGT after electricity workers cut the power to an Amazon facility in Morlaàs in the south of France to protest Emmanuel Macron’s pension reforms…. Read more »

JODY CORCORAN CALLS IT

Date: April 5, 2023 -

BLOODY POLLS. They can make whizz psephologists such as the Sunday Independent’s Jody Corcoran look positively foolish, with banal stats that take no account of profound insights into the body politic. Seizing on the Sindo’s Ireland Thinks poll a month ago, which showed the Social Democrats had bounced (“soared”) from 4% to 9% just days… Read more »

ELLIE KISYOMBE KEEPS BUSY

Date: April 5, 2023 -

NO DOUBT one-time Social Democrats local election candidate Ellie Kisyombe was breathing a sign of relief last month when she was given just a caution at Blanchardstown District Court for assaulting a Ukrainian kitchen assistant at a centre for asylum seekers in 2019. This is the sort of publicity the self-described “public figure, politician, mum,… Read more »

CIARA FLOOD’S BANKERS

Date: April 5, 2023 -

AS THE dust settles on the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), assorted Irish customers with loan facilities are breathing a sigh of relief that HSBC came to the rescue. Happily, the potential fallout for Irish companies was contained by the takeover of the UK arm of the Californian bank. One business turns out to… Read more »

FRANCESCA’S SWISS ROLE

Date: March 23, 2023 -

WHILE THERE has been acres of space devoted to the trials and tribulations of Credit Suisse in the business media in particular, the name of Francesca McDonagh has been noticeable by its absence. Credit Suisse has turned out to be an even bigger basket-case of a bank than had been understood. Having suffered from corporate… Read more »

PROFILE: HOLLY CAIRNS

Date: March 23, 2023 -

THE NEW leader of the Social Democrats has enjoyed a media reception of the kind normally enjoyed by a triumphant, first-time, incoming taoiseach. Yet Holly Cairns (33) is merely a TD of two years standing and has been parachuted into the leadership of the Soc Dems following the resignation of the party’s two co-leaders –… Read more »

YOUNG BLOOD: CHUPI SWEETMAN

Date: March 23, 2023 -

A savvy businesswoman, Chupi Sweetman has quite the line in sales patter and a penchant for attaching carefully selected buzzwords to her “ethical” and “sustainable” jewellery brand. Having recently secured a reported €3.75m in funding to expand her eponymous brand, Sweetman is aiming to hit a whopping €40m in turnover over the next five years…. Read more »

ENDA MCNULTY’S PERFORMANCE

Date: March 23, 2023 -

IT HAS been hard to avoid the dulcet tones of former Armagh All-Ireland winning full-back Enda McNulty in recent weeks as he has done the rounds on the chat shows discussing the sports motivation and corporate management strategies he now sells through his McNulty Performance business. There was also plenty of talk about rugby given… Read more »

‘IT’ CENSORS DENIS O’BRIEN

Date: March 23, 2023 -

THE IRISH TIMES editorial office is locked in ethical debate about whether to publish a letter on behalf of mega-mogul, Denis O’Brien. His PR handler, James Morrissey, wrote in response to a recent article by Anne Harris that praised Catherine Murphy TD for her role in events leading to the Commission of Investigation into the… Read more »