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DOUBLE ACT

Date: October 2, 2025 -

SEAN HANNIGAN and Clodagh Robinson of the Double Property Group boast an impressive property portfolio, with the company’s website proclaiming total assets worth €49m and annual income of €10m. And while they have not been having too much luck recently, at least in Co Longford, the duo do have plenty of other projects to distract… Read more »

NIAMH’S NEXT GIG

Date: October 2, 2025 -

WELL-KNOWN campaigner Niamh Uí Bhriain will surely have been disappointed that her fellow pro-life advocate, Maria Steen, failed to get the nod to run for the Áras this month. The former, however, does have rather a lot on her hands in trying to get a few different enterprises off the ground. Uí Bhriain is already… Read more »

DES MCGAHAN’S PRICE WATCH

Date: October 2, 2025 -

GOLDHAWK NOTES that the asking price for the truly impressive Ballinacurra House outside Kinsale continues to slide, much to the chagrin of former owner Des McGahan, who continues to insist that the price being sought by the receiver for Mars Capital Finance grossly undervalues the property – where one Michael Jackson enjoyed a sojourn with… Read more »

JOHN MAGNIER’S CREDIBILITY PROBLEM

Date: September 18, 2025 -

JOHN MAGNIER is having a dreadful year in the Four Goldmines, with not just one but two High Court judges getting stuck into him. The high-profile (ie expensive) legal proceedings launched by Magnier and family members to force the sale of Richard Thomson-Moore’s sprawling Barne Estate to his Coolmore operation backfired spectacularly this week and… Read more »

PROFILE: HEATHER HUMPHREYS

Date: September 18, 2025 -

FINE GAEL’S presidential candidate, Heather Humphreys, has been packaged by the party and its media supporters as a no-nonsense, can-do matriarch, whose Protestant background facilitated inclusive management of the 1916 commemorations. A benign glow of rural wholesomeness has been created around the Monaghan politician whose chief virtue, it appears, is one of saintly political decency…. Read more »

YOUNG BLOOD: MAISIE HALL

Date: September 18, 2025 -

UNIVERSITY OF GALWAY (formerly known as NUIG) Students’ Union (SU) has a new president, Maisie Hall. Hailing from Dingle, Co Kerry, and born to English parents, she received the highest number of votes ever for the position of Galway SU president, beating Elijah Burke (of… Read more »

BLOODY SUNDAY: THE REAL STORY

Date: September 18, 2025 -

Anyone hoping that the full truth about Bloody Sunday will emerge from the trial of Soldier F is likely to be disappointed. The official narrative, outlined in Lord Saville’s 2010 report, claims paratroopers, in an impromptu frenzy, massacred 13 innocent people in Derry, with a… Read more »

CONOR MCGREGOR’S MMA SHARES

Date: September 18, 2025 -

CONOR McGREGOR has had his hands full over the last few weeks, between seeking a nomination for the presidency, announcing an MMA bout on the White House lawn next summer and keeping an eye on the alleged perjury investigation into two of the witnesses who… Read more »

JP McMANUS’S BAD DREAM

Date: September 18, 2025 -

GENEVA-BASED JP McManus’s dream of winning the Club Godolphin Cesarewitch with his 10/1 second favourite, A Dream To Share, has turned into something closer to a nightmare. The John Kiely-trained seven-year-old was deemed ineligible to run in Newmarket’s £175,000 heritage handicap as the Irish handicapper, Garry O’Gorman, had failed to allocate the former national hunt… Read more »

JENNY KEANE’S OH! MOMENT

Date: September 18, 2025 -

GOLDHAWK’S FAVOURITE “trail-blazing holistic sex educator”, Jenny Keane, was generating media attention again ahead of the latest live show, the Orgasm Tour. This follows on foot of a rebrand by the 39-year-old, D4-based entrepreneur, which has seen the boring old jennykeane.com website name now jazzed up to oh-moment.com. Earlier this month, Jenny was given a… Read more »

BOB GELDOF’S MASTER PLAN

Date: September 18, 2025 -

THE MYSTERY of why Bob Geldof should want to be president of a nation whose 1916 origins he despises and whose leaders, Pearse and Connolly, he has traduced has become apparent to Goldhawk. Bob’s anguish at Ireland’s misplaced fight for freedom – he has argued we were better off in the empire – led him… Read more »

DECLAN RYAN’S DISCOUNT

Date: September 18, 2025 -

GREAT NEWS for fans of saunas and minted publishers. One of the (two) books published to date by Irelandia Press is now being offered for sale with a very generous discount of just on 40%. Ryanair moneybags Declan Ryan is the man behind the publishing venture and its first offering, earlier this year, was called… Read more »

ALAN HAUGH’S SETBACK

Date: September 18, 2025 -

POPULAR BARRISTER Alan Haugh BL got plenty of support from the media for his criticisms of the decision by Peter Burke’s Department of Enterprise not to reappoint the legal eagle as deputy chairman of the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) after a mere decade in the role. As poor Alan told the Indo last week, he… Read more »

JOE LEWIS’S TACTICS

Date: September 18, 2025 -

CONTROVERSIAL BILLIONAIRE Joe Lewis – familiar in these parts thanks to his close connections to fellow moneybags Dermot Desmond, JP McManus and John Magnier – has bounced back from last year’s public embarrassment, with his family overseeing a clinical coup in Premier League footie team Tottenham Hotspur. Last year, Bahamas-based Lewis managed to avoid prison… Read more »

VOL 43 NO 19

Date: September 18, 2025 -

NETFLIX AND BILL

Date: September 18, 2025 -

EARLIER THIS year, culture and communications minister Patrick O’Donovan appeared to nix an attempt to introduce a levy on the giant streaming companies, known as the ‘Netflix levy’. A revolt on the Oireachtas communications committee by the Fianna Fáil partners in coalition has resulted in a recommendation in favour of the levy. Among those who… Read more »

MICHAEL GOVE V KINGSPAN

Date: September 18, 2025 -

IT’S BEEN a year since former judge Martin Moore-Bick issued his report on the inquiry into the Grenfell Tower tragedy and Kingspan boss Eugene Murtagh could be forgiven for thinking that the whole thing is in the rear-view mirror. Unfortunately, one man seems intent on making sure that the British government does not forget the… Read more »

GARETH SHERIDAN’S SUPPORTERS

Date: September 18, 2025 -

GARETH SHERIDAN’S presidential nomination campaign brought together unlikely allies. Fresh from winning a 18-14 nomination from Kerry County Council on September 15, the 36-year-old multi-millionaire came up short the same evening at Laois County Council, with a vote of 11-6. The presidential hopeful, who is largely running on a platform of being 36 years of… Read more »

PSNI’S ABSENT OMBUDSMAN

Date: September 18, 2025 -

AS IF the doubts about British PM Keir Starmer’s willingness to reform Britain’s Legacy Act were not alarming enough, the “temporary leave of absence” of Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman Marie Anderson – whose office oversees investigations into police conduct, of which there are many pending – has hardly been timely. In June this year the… Read more »

HARD-RIGHT DISUNITY

Date: September 18, 2025 -

The series of anti-immigration rallies that brought thousands on to the streets over the spring and summer months in Grand Old Duke of York fashion have petered out in recent weeks as crowds attending fell dramatically. At the same, time negotiations between the various right-wing parties and independent activists trying to agree to the formation… Read more »

THE HOT AIR BRIGADE

Date: September 18, 2025 -

As a result the play leans heavily into dream logic. “Are we our soul or our body? Is the soul older than the body?” McLaughlin asks in a playful tone. “If the moon can be a person, why can’t Oedipus be a baby and a man at the same time?” Caitríona McLaughlin, Abbey Theatre artistic… Read more »

PAT FINUCANE: COLLUSION INQUIRY

Date: September 18, 2025 -

SIR GARY HICKINBOTTOM, chair of the Finucane Inquiry, is in consultation with northern secretary Hilary Benn to agree his terms of reference. The inquiry is to report on accusations of state collusion with the UDA gang responsible for the murder of Patrick Finucane at his Belfast home, in front of his wife Geraldine and their… Read more »

WILLING TAOISEACH

Date: September 18, 2025 -

WHEN OUR willing Taoiseach Micheál Martin strides across the world stage, as he recently did with a message to the Coalition of the Willing (COTW) in support of Ukraine, he is determined to be in step with countries he describes as “like-minded European and international partners”. But there is a serious credibility gap between Martin’s… Read more »

DARRAGH O’BRIEN’S FLIGHTS OF FANCY

Date: September 18, 2025 -

There is something almost nostalgic to see a north Dublin Fianna Fáil TD engaging in the kind of cute hoorism around climate change that was the political trademark of Squire Hockey in his pomp. The TD in question, Darragh O’Brien, was first elected to the Dáil in 2007 as a junior member of the FF-led… Read more »

FISHY KILL

Date: September 18, 2025 -

State agencies are being remarkably coy about who is likely responsible for the massive fish kill along a 40km stretch of Cork’s Blackwater river. Ella McSweeney reported in the Irish Times at the weekend that since March 2020 the EPA has issued North Cork Creameries with a staggering 125 ‘non-compliance notices’, an average of one… Read more »

TOXIC STORMONT

Date: September 18, 2025 -

At the beginning of the month the Stormont assembly returned from the long – many say too long – summer recess. It held its first executive meeting on September 4, after which Michelle O’Neill and Emma Little-Pengelly gave a joint press conference. They hadn’t been seen together for months, during which time there had been… Read more »

DANGEROUS MOMENTS FOR MICHEÁL MARTIN

Date: September 18, 2025 -

WITH FIANNA FÁIL back bench TDs now getting the bit firmly between their teeth in the revolt against Micheál Martin’s Brezhnev behaviour in the selection of their presidential candidate, there is danger ahead for the Taoiseach. And the presidential campaign of Jim Gavin is only one of the unexploded mines strewn in Martin’s path as… Read more »

VIKTOR ORBÁN SNUBBED

Date: September 18, 2025 -

HUNGARIAN PRIME MINISTER Viktor Orbán cut a lonely figure, politically and diplomatically speaking, at the Ireland v Hungary soccer match in Dublin this month. He was not accompanied by any Government representative and certainly not his counterpart, Taoiseach Micheál Martin. The official line from Government was that Orbán’s visit was a private one and he… Read more »

CRUELLA MACNEILL DEVOURS HEALTH OFFICIAL

Date: September 18, 2025 -

FOLLOWING HER long-range sniper shot at party leader Simon Harris, appropriately enough at Béal na Bláth last month, news emerged of health minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill’s metaphorical assassination of distinguished public servant David Begg in July. Cruella MacNeill swept out of the Mater Hospital, followed by her awe-struck retinue, after she had gunned down Begg,… Read more »

LOYALIST SCHIZOPHRENIA

Date: September 18, 2025 -

SOUTHERN MEDIA continue to treat the black north like some unexplored 19th-century colony, with wildly different takes on sectarian attacks on Catholics and immigrants there – that’s if they bother to report on such events at all. A heart-warming headline in a recent Sunday Times Irish edition proclaimed: “Loyalists shield immigrants”. This was over an… Read more »

SPY GAMES

Date: September 18, 2025 -

HOW FASCINATING to read in the Sunday Times – MI5’s favourite newspaper – that ex-taoiseach Leo Varadkar knew the Brits were capable of tapping Irish government phones during Brexit negotiations. Micheál Martin, on the other hand, said that because the two countries enjoy a “good relationship”, Britain did not need to keep us under surveillance…. Read more »

UKRAINIAN DEMOCRAT’S MURDER

Date: September 18, 2025 -

THE IRISH and European media constantly deride the Russian media as Putin’s obedient mouthpiece – quite unlike the free western media, which does not simply regurgitate their government’s line in any global conflict. “Ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Parubiy” was recently shot dead in Lviv, Ukraine, and EU, British and Irish media wrote about his contribution to… Read more »

KEARNS SIBLINGS’ LEGAL LESSON

Date: September 18, 2025 -

GOLDHAWK SPIES an interesting-looking case filed in the High Court, with two unlikely named unlimited companies – Unifield and Minervavig – suing recruitment consultants Louise Allen and Brian Cunningham. The low-profile plaintiffs here have pretty deep pockets. Defendants Allen and Cunningham are well-known players in the recruitment consultancy business but were in the news for… Read more »

MOLING’S MISSION

Date: September 18, 2025 -

AS REVEALED by Goldhawk (see The Phoenix 25/7/25), culture minister Patrick O’Donovan has installed his department’s favourite troubleshooter, Moling Ryan, as the interim director of the Arts Council. He replaces Maureen Kennelly and his selection confirms the minister’s view that a Merrion Square insider was not going to be considered for the gig. Indeed, it… Read more »

BEACH BODIES

Date: September 18, 2025 -

LAYTOWN RACES’S September beach race day featured some popular winners this year. Owner James McAuley and his Hilltop Racing entourage returned from a self-imposed sabbatical to again team up with trainer Denis Hogan’s stable for victory in the Download The New Tote App Qualified Riders race. Having trained predominantly for his uncle – the tenacious… Read more »

UNIPHAR’S SHARE PRICE BASED ON AN AWFUL LOT OF OPTIMISM

Date: September 18, 2025 -

UNIPHAR has been generating glowing tributes in the media and the marketplace this year on foot of the impressive performance of its shares on the Irish market, which have almost doubled from €2.12 at the end of last year to over €4 currently, at which the company is now capitalised at just over €1bn. There have… Read more »