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April 22 - May 05, 2022
Affairs of the Nation
ZELENSKIY’S OFFSHORE LINKS
THERE HAS, unsurprisingly, been plenty of media coverage of the main players in the Ukrainian war, with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy the recipient of lavish praise for his tactics against the... Read more »
JAY BOURKE’S PR
IT HAS been hard to avoid disqualified restaurateur and publican Jay Bourke, whose media campaign in recent weeks has seen him feature prominently in the news bemoaning the determination of... Read more »
TREVOR’S TONIC
GOLDHAWK IS delighted to report that accounts just made available reveal that the Little Museum of Dublin has been sailing through the pandemic, and the salary of its director Trevor... Read more »
MARTIN TRUCE WITH O’CALLAGHAN?
ONE OF the intriguing choices Micheál Martin will get to make when he retires as taoiseach in December is who to appoint as justice minister. The deal with Fine Gael... Read more »
MARY IRVINE’S SUCCESSOR
THE TOP four favourites to succeed Ms Justice Mary Irvine as president of the High Court each have distinguished credentials in the areas that they oversee, ie, in the court... Read more »
RTÉ’S LOST DECADE
“FUTURE GENERATIONS will judge us by how we deal with climate change”, presenter Fran McNulty solemnly intoned when opening RTÉ’s Prime Time climate special last week. The ‘us’ McNulty referred... Read more »
MALI AND SIMON COVENEY’S ‘SHOCK’
HIDDEN AWAY at the bottom of page 4 in the Irish Times recently was a short article about how the Irish Defence Forces had ceased training the Malian military after... Read more »
RACEHORSE OWNERS UNSADDLE CHAIRMAN
THIS WEEK sees the second annual general meeting in a few months of the Association of Irish Racehorse Owners (Airo), the representative organisation for bloodstock owners that has been characterised... Read more »
FACEBOOK FACES UP TO MIRIAM
CELEB SOLICITOR Paul Tweed was a natural as Murrium O’Callaghan’s brief in her case against Facebook for “malicious falsehood, defamation, various breaches of constitutional rights, and unlawful appropriation of personality”... Read more »
MICHAEL HACKMAN’S NEW PLOT
THERE WEREN’T too much questions asked by nosey hacks when Pascal Donohoe was roped into the PR exercise heralding a €300m Greystones film studio ‘campus’ backed by Michael Hackman’s Hackman... Read more »
Pillars of Society
PROFILE: PETER BURKE
LEO VARADKAR clawed back 2% in his own personal ratings and, more importantly, saw the same increase for Fine Gael in the latest Irish... Read more »
The Young Bloods
YOUNG BLOOD: NATHAN ADAMS
ENTREPRENEUR AND celebrity squeeze Nathan Adams is quite the man about town around Cork, organising launches, lashing out new enterprises, and hanging out with... Read more »
Fit to Print?
MAJORITY DISAGREE WITH ‘IRISH TIMES’!
PATHOLOGICAL EUROPHILES at the Irish Times were gobsmacked at the rebuff received from the newspaper’s poll asking if people wanted to abandon neutrality. After several weeks of Lord Kitchener type... Read more »
ALL KINDS OF DEFAMATION
THE IRISH TIMES is the latest newspaper to concede defeat and cough up a serious sum of money to John Brown, brother of Dana Rosemary Scallon, former MEP and former... Read more »
JOHN KILRAINE: RTÉ’S MAN IN LONDON
LONG-TIME RTÉ Dublin correspondent John Kilraine is switching capital cities to become the station’s London corr, a logical step in one sense in that he was born there, although he... Read more »
Last Refuge
‘I COME TO BURY NOT TO PRAISE TONY’
CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER (CMO) Tony Holohan was effectively buried by Micheál Martin when he ‘paused’ (shafted) his sweet deal at Trinity College Dublin. The taoiseach followed up with the obligatory... Read more »
GALWAY BAY FM BLUES
STAFF AT Galway Bay FM and local members of Fine Gael will be hoping that things settle down following turmoil at the station in the past year or so. In... Read more »
CIAN O’CALLAGHAN V AODHÁN Ó RÍORDÁIN
NEW LABOUR leader Ivana Bacik’s dead cat bounce has not deterred Labour handlers from predicting seat gains that will double their complement of seven TDs at the next general election.... Read more »
MICHAEL D HIGGINS’S NEUTRALITY WARNING TO GOVERNMENT
MESSRS MARTIN, Varadkar and Ryan cannot say they were not warned should there be open confrontation between them and President Higgins over neutrality and the government’s rush to arms. In... Read more »
Hush Hush
DISSIDENT GROUPS’ EASTER TREAT
APART FROM Sinn Féin there are others that lay claim to the tradition of Irish republicanism and they haven’t gone away either, you know. Easter has for decades allowed observers... Read more »
Bog Cuttings
BOG CUTTINGS
‘A F***ING ROOKIE, AND A F***ING TRAMP’ A CORK man appearing before Cork District Court denied being intoxicated, or saying a string of profanities, while being confronted by gardaí after... Read more »
Fowl Emissions
OLIGARCH OLEG’S IRISH LOBBYISTS
RUSSIAN OLIGARCH Oleg Deripaska, a friend and arms supplier to Vladimir Putin, was playing cat and mouse last weekend in a bid to hold onto his €60m superyacht ‘Clio’ following... Read more »
CROKE PARK HOT AIR
“MORAL AND economic madness,” is how UN secretary general António Guterres recently described investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure. Don’t tell the speakers at next week’s Energy Summit 2022 at... Read more »
The Hot Air Brigade
THE HOT AIR BRIGADE
I’m an empath and I feel things so strongly sometimes that I have to work hard to turn it off, you know? And I feel everything all the time. Like... Read more »
New York is hilarious, I’ve been to New York and in the subways, I get, ‘What are you doing here Tubs?’ I’m actually okay with it. Ryan Tubridy, Sunday World,... Read more »
High Society
NOELLE O’CONNOR’S GLOW
THIS MONTH is the first in which online and e-commerce sales of fake tanning (sorry, self-tanning) products are subject to new EU regulations limiting the level of the chemical dehydroxyacetone... Read more »
AVRIL DOYLE’S NEW GIG
THE WORTHIES on the board of the Irish Heritage Trust (IHT) have just been joined by the Wexford-based former Fine Gael MEP turned lobbyist Avril Doyle. The one-time Blueshirt minister... Read more »
MAKING MONEY WITH JAMIE AND LAUREN
A NICE looking Dublin 6 pad, at 65 Ranelagh Road, got the full sales pitch from the Business Post earlier this month. It turns out to be just one of... Read more »
Behind the Scenes
WRITERS CENTRE’S WINNING PLOT
NEXT WEEK sees the launch (online, natch) by the Irish Writers Centre (IWC) of the 2023 Novel Fair, which promises to introduce 12 lucky scribblers to top publishers and literary... Read more »
LUVVIES ARE REVOLTING
THE BOLSHY spear carriers at Irish Equity, the union representing assorted luvvies, clearly boosted by Gerry O’Brien sharing his contract from 1984 for a guest appearance on RTÉ’s Leave it... Read more »
Sport of Kings
NO MONEY NO HONEY
WHEN THE Nicky Henderson-trained Constitution Hill stormed to victory in the opening race at Cheltenham last month, his owner Michael Buckley suggested he would not be averse to letting his... Read more »
THE DRIVE FOR FIVE
THE TALK of Cheltenham possibly adding on a fifth day to the annual March shindig has been rumbling on for some time now and it moved one step closer to... Read more »
TOLERATING TITAN JACK
THE IRISH Horseracing Regulatory Board has put a lot of effort in recent times into discouraging non-triers and rooting out doping offenders. One area, where not enough is being done,... Read more »
GORDON ELLIOTT’S TV SNUB
WHEN GORDON ELLIOTT trained a Grade 1 double at Aintree recently, with JP McManus’s Three Strip Life and Sire Du Berlais, there were a lot of raised eyebrows over the... Read more »
Reviews
DERRY GIRLS – CHANNEL 4
ARRIVING ON the now-familiar wave of hype, the Ireland.com-sponsored third and final series of Derry Girls once again saw some home-grown commentators return to a favourite theme – that of the best... Read more »
Moneybags
POST-PANDEMIC SEAS STILL ROUGH FOR ICG
WITH P&O deciding to sack all 800 of its British car ferry staff and introduce new ‘yellow pack’ crewing arrangements, ICG could well find itself in store for a serious... Read more »
THE DRUGS ARE WORKING FOR MALIN CORP
MALIN CORP had an eventful history after Kelly Martin raised €400m when floating it in 2015. Unfortunately for investors, the plan to back small pharma entities and turn them into... Read more »
The Hot Water Brigade
JARLATH GANTLY’S BUMPY RIDE
LAST MONTH, Jarlath Gantly was chatting to transport minister Eamon Ryan about the latest e-transport sharing scheme unveiled by the Co Sligo-based businessman. Gantly has been pushing electric biking for... Read more »
EDMOND O’REILLY’S ADVENTURES
THERE HAS been a lot of water under the bridge since Edmond O’Reilly’s much-hyped Trustwater company collapsed into liquidation six years ago, but the winding-up continues. According to documents just... Read more »
RED RAGE IN THE BLACK
THE SUCCESSFUL advertising production company, Red Rage Productions, set up 25 years ago by equal shareholders Paul Holmes (CEO) and Gary Moore (MD), has just been wound up by the... Read more »
BURSTING THE COLLISONS’ BUBBLE
IRISH BUSINESS hacks predictably lapped up the news that John and Patrick Collison, the tousle-headed tech tyros, are now worth a whopping $9.5bn each, according to the Billionaires List compiled... Read more »
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