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KEATING’S WORRYING LOSS-MAKER INSIDE FD TECHNOLOGIES

Date: February 20, 2025 -

OVER 24 years, Brian Conlon built up the hugely successful Newry-based First Derivatives group, now FD Technologies (FDT), into a highly profitable operation in the arcane world of compliance and supervision of financial derivatives, capitalised at £2bn before his sudden death in July 2019. It has taken his replacement as CEO, Séamus Keating, just four years… Read more »

WEE CARE’S WEDGE

Date: February 20, 2025 -

FIGURES JUST filed for the Belfast-controlled Wee Care nursery business, which has significant operations in south Co Dublin, show that founder Ian Buchanan has been scooping big bucks. In the not-too-distant past, he went to great lengths to keep a lid on the more sensitive details of his operation here. Wee Care Ltd ended up… Read more »

HAMISH KHAYAT’S OLD NUMBERS

Date: February 20, 2025 -

ONE HAMISH Khayat must have been flashing his pearly whites from ear to ear after last weekend’s gushing article in the Business Post. The 34-year-old – who believes it is his mission to “democratise oral hygiene” – was in Dublin to promote a new toothbrush from his California-headquartered Burst Oral Care (BOC) business, which now… Read more »

DERMOT PURCELL’S GOOD GOING

Date: February 20, 2025 -

FANS OF the sport of kings will have noted that well-liked racehorse trainer Harry Rogers has been back in the High Court with the state-funded regulatory body, Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board (IHRB), and a Limerick-based drug testing company called BHP Laboratories (see p19). Both entities are defending the long-running case, which has its origins back… Read more »

FRANCIS HANRAHAN’S FOOTWORK

Date: February 20, 2025 -

THE DREADED taxman has just registered a judgment for €42,000 against a company called Unit 3 Ltd, which is owned by Mount Merrion-based Francis Hanrahan. While dealing with the Revenue is no walk in the park, Hanrahan has more pressing matters to contend with. Notably an upcoming outing in the Four Goldmines in front of… Read more »

AG v. FORMER CLIENT MICHAEL LOWRY

Date: February 6, 2025 -

EVEN BY the cloistered circumstances of the Four Goldmines, the interaction between Attorney General Rossa Fanning and legal issues concerning Michael Lowry is unusual as highlighted by the case taken by Sinn Féin TD, Pa Daly, against the government and which was mentioned in the High Court this week. Daly is arguing that the attendance… Read more »

PROFILE: JIM O’CALLAGHAN

Date: February 6, 2025 -

AMONG THE winners and losers of the general election it’s clear that Fianna Fáil’s Micheál Martin bested Fine Gael’s Simon Harris. But within FF a surprise victor electorally and in terms of the leadership stakes has been barrister Jim O’Callaghan who had begun to look like just another leadership contender that never made it. It… Read more »

YOUNG BLOOD: KAYLEIGH TRAPPE

Date: February 6, 2025 -

FORMER PRIMARY school teacher Kayleigh Trappe is the latest example of RTÉ plucking someone with a modicum of talent and a healthy online following and stretching both the talent and viewers’ patience to beyond breaking point. Call it the “Doireann Garrihy Strategy”, if you will, where the broadcaster’s penchant for thrusting personable young influencers without… Read more »

DERMOT DESMOND’S SMASH

Date: February 6, 2025 -

THERE COULD be quite the racket in Old Belvedere Rugby Club next week if a controversial plan to demolish the squash courts and replace them with three trendy new padel tennis courts gets the green light. One man who will be paying particular attention to developments is the club’s neighbour and benefactor, Dermot Desmond. Not… Read more »

PATRICK O’DONOVAN’S ART ATTACK

Date: February 6, 2025 -

FANS OF Goldhawk will be familiar with the drama that has been unfolding in the Arts Council in recent months, as the scale of the overspend on a new IT system (sorry “business transformation programme”) becomes clear. Now the new arts and culture minister, Patrick O’Donovan, has been brought up to speed on the story… Read more »

DOIREANN GARRIHY’S U-TURN

Date: February 6, 2025 -

ANOTHER FAMILIAR name from Dances With The Stars is Doireann Garrihy, who fronts the show alongside Jennifer Zamparelli. While DG’s presence in the line-out for this latest season of the Shinawil production for Montrose was apparently never in doubt after she announced her exit from RTÉ, what is rather more surprising is Doireann’s return to… Read more »

VIRGIN MEDIA’S ‘VIDEO NASTY’

Date: February 6, 2025 -

THE CRITICAL reaction to Virgin Media’s TV’s accomplished comedy/horror drama series set in the 1980s, Video Nasty, will have been toasted in Screen Ireland (SI) and Coimisiún na Meán, who chucked in a fair wedge, although BBC NI has been able to hog the limelight. The show, written by Hugh Travers, has aired on BBC… Read more »

JAMIE’S MYERSCOUGH SHAKE-UP

Date: February 6, 2025 -

IT HAS been hard to avoid former Take That member Robbie Williams in recent weeks, as the hype machine has cranked up the gears to promote his Better Man biopic and album as well as the new world tour touching down in Croke Park next August. Presumably, one of the multitude in attendance will be… Read more »

UNSIGHTLY SCENES AT IRISH TIMES

Date: February 6, 2025 -

JIM O’CALLAGHAN, now the justice minister, led the charge against the tents housing asylum seekers that sprouted up outside the International Protection Office (IPO) on Dublin’s Mount Street last year. Describing the tents as “dangerous and unhygienic and unfair”, he emphasised, in line with his pre-election pitch, that they were “also unlawful”; and in case… Read more »

DUNDON’S QUICK STEP

Date: February 6, 2025 -

HAVING LASTED longer than most predicted, clunky Kevin Dundon’s participation in RTÉ’s Dancing With The Stars further boosted the profile of the so-called ‘celebrity chef’, which should be good news for his business which is now under the control of the family of one Dr Mehmet Oz, aka ‘Dr Oz’. Late last year a rather… Read more »

VOL 43 NO 03

Date: February 6, 2025 -

‘MAD’ MERRIGAN’S RETURN

Date: February 6, 2025 -

GOLDHAWK’S FAVOURITE horseracing tipster Paddy ‘Mad’ Merrigan delighted his many followers with a surprise social media post last week, announcing the return of his live ‘Mad Merrigan Coldbeer Sports’ stream. The bolshy Merrigan has been conspicuous by his absence since a colourful video rant went viral in May last year and he received hundreds of… Read more »

BAR COUNCIL TEA SHOCK

Date: February 6, 2025 -

WHILE PLENTY of our learn’d friends in the Law Library are focused on recent activity over the the failure of the government to return the fees paid to barristers involved in legal aid criminal matters to pre-crash levels, of rather more import is the long delay in the re-opening of the Barristers’ Tea Rooms. Certainly,… Read more »

VERONA SELL OUT?

Date: February 6, 2025 -

WAS IT the main government parties, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael that capitulated to the growing public anger at the Rural Independent Group (RIG) trying to have it every way which way in the Dail? Or was it the RIG and the two Healy-Rae brothers that developed a cold sweat in the face of such… Read more »

THE BIG APPLE

Date: February 6, 2025 -

IT ONLY took four months but the department of finance finally agreed to detail the names of the barristers and solicitors as well as the payments they received for their work in the state’s failed legal action with the EU Commission over its near €14bn Apple Tax ruling. When Goldhawk asked in mid-September last who,… Read more »

XL BULLY CAMPAIGN CONTINUES

Date: February 6, 2025 -

THE CAMPAIGN by assorted charities against the implementation of the ban on the dangerous XL Bully breed of dog here continues to gain momentum, most recently with a High Court ruling that has put a temporary stay on the requirement of animal shelters to put down the animals. In parallel, the equally important PR campaign… Read more »

RIVAL OMAGH BOMBING CLAIMS

Date: February 6, 2025 -

David Rupert, the FBI-MI5 spy who sat on the Army Council of the Real IRA, has said he is prepared to testify at Lord Turnbull’s Omagh bomb inquiry and will repeat a previous claim he made that it was the Continuity IRA, not the Real IRA, that carried out the bombing. Rupert is a former… Read more »

TRULY LETHAL

Date: February 6, 2025 -

THE CURRENT obsession with militarisation in Ireland and other EU states has more to do with stimulating armaments manufacturing in Europe than Ukraine. One company well placed to take advantage of this bellicose mood is VRAI Simulation which has developed quite a niche for itself in Ireland’s technology sector. VRAI specialises in creating virtual reality… Read more »

AUSSIE NAZIS’ IRISH LINKS

Date: February 6, 2025 -

It’s not every day that seventeen neo-Nazis are arrested. So when members of the National Socialist Network (NSN) were rounded up at a rally in Adelaide over the Australia Day long weekend in January it made headlines across Australia’s media with pictures of the rally and arrests also going viral on social media. What might… Read more »

THE HOT AIR BRIGADE

Date: February 6, 2025 -

In Irish there is feminine and masculine and ‘Irish’ is feminine. I absolutely love that our language is basically a woman. It’s a real power play isn’t it? Síomha Ní Ruairc, Irish Independent While running for an election (Seanad Trinity panel), it seems a bad time to quit a social media platform that I have… Read more »

STORMY WEATHER WE’RE HAVING

Date: February 6, 2025 -

Storm Éowyn elicited an array of knee-jerk reactions, but Independent Ireland leader Michael Collins’s was in a league of its own. “We need, as a state, to look at felling trees within 30 metres of all roadsides,” he told RTÉ’s Rachael English. “They’re taking down poles, they’re taking down broadband, they’re killing people, they’re injuring… Read more »

KEVIN MCPARTLAN’S LEXICON

Date: February 6, 2025 -

Lobbyist Kevin McPartlan showed up in this magazine’s Hot Air Brigade in 2017, arguing against a sugar tax. “There is no such thing as a bad food – only inappropriate consumption,” said the then director of Food Drinks Industry Ireland, apparently with a straight face.  McPartlan has since switched from fast food to fossil fuels,… Read more »

DUP IN FULL FLIGHT

Date: February 6, 2025 -

Five years since Brexit, four years since the Irish Sea border convulsed the DUP, protest marches, street demonstrations, riots led to the collapse of Stormont. Now, the north is back where it was with Stormont operating, but the Irish Sea border is tightening. The DUP remains implacable. The party split in 2021 over its response… Read more »

HOUSING MINISTER’S ANGST

Date: February 6, 2025 -

DESPITE HIS elevation to the most challenging department in government (that’s a polite euphemism for the job of housing minister, the most arduous and politically life threatening job in politics) colleagues of James Browne are not exactly overwhelmed at his ‘promotion’ to this posting. If Brian Cowen thought that the department of health was Angola… Read more »

PRESIDENT O’TOOLE (POT)

Date: February 6, 2025 -

THAT SECULAR Irish Times preacher, Fintan O’Toole, declined to rule himself out of the running for the presidency in the Sunday Independent last week indicates that the semi-retired writer is giving serious thought to the proposition and that others, too, are considering him as a viable candidate. This is despite Fintan togging out before for… Read more »

SVIATIANA’S CONFERENCE

Date: February 6, 2025 -

Having spent many summers in Roscrea as part of the Chernobyl Children’s Project, Belorussian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, has been fêted by the Irish political establishment ever since the imprisonment of her husband Siarhei Tsikhanousky. Taoiseach Micheál Martin in 2022 described Tsikhanouskaya as an “inspiring leader”, while, after meeting her in 2023, then Taoiseach Leo… Read more »

LONESOME COWBOY TD, MATTIE

Date: February 6, 2025 -

FOR SOME years Mattie McGrath was the archetypal rural Independent having left Fianna Fáil in 2010, partly over the EU-IMF bail-out and in recent years was seen as leader of the Rural Independent Group (RIG) formed after the 2020 general election. But the Independents are, if anything, more factional and fratricidal than the soldiers of… Read more »

OFFIDE SUNDAY TIMES

Date: February 6, 2025 -

THROUGH GRITTED teeth English rugby commentators conceded that their team was well beaten by the Aawrish last Saturday. Even MI5’s favourite newspaper, the Sunday Times’, in its main report was headlined “IRELAND SIMPLY HARDER, FASTER AND SMARTER”. Unfortunately, the colonial mindset sometimes rears its head in English rugger-bugger circles and writer, Stephen Jones, very early… Read more »

IRISH TIMES WARRIORS

Date: February 6, 2025 -

THE PILE-ON against neutrality and for a serious increase in military expenditure is a sacred mission for the western jihadists in the Irish Times, and political editor, Pat Leahy, warmed yet again to this theme last weekend. A constant mantra recently is that the big boys in the EU are in a state of “disbelief”… Read more »

SLOWLY DOES IT IN KILKENNY

Date: February 6, 2025 -

IT HAS taken quite a while for Design & Crafts Council Ireland (DCCI) in Kilkenny to get around to advertising for its new chief executive, but the relaxed process is finally under way. It was back at the start of June last year that the Residential Tenancies Board announced that Rosemary Steen, then chief executive… Read more »

NICHOLLS NOBBLED AGAIN

Date: February 6, 2025 -

THE RECORD €740,000 purchase from the Alan and Gemma Brown’s dispersal sale at Tattersalls – Caldwell Potter – was a beaten odds-on favourite for the second time in three starts since joining Paul Nicholls from the Gordon Elliott stable. The grey Martaline gelding is the latest in the series of high-priced flops to emerge from… Read more »