Anyone reared in Catholic Ireland is deep down a cheapskate. Twas bet into you.
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Paddy will be doing podcasts with Ivor Cummins within a year or two.
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Those at the helm for the Celtic Tiger’s flagrant largesse were all reared when the church still held power
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I’d give it 18 weeks
I’d argue they missed the full fear of it.
McCreevy was born in the 40s. Bertie 1951. They’d a solid 30 years of church to shape them.
Frugal they were not
Bertie was a skinflint. Robbed the country and never spent a penny bar the odd United match and few pints in O Dowds.
Had to pay for a separation and a ride on the alimony pony
Yeah easy be generous with our money
An incident involving Paddy Cosgrave and a representative of the IDA was described as “particularly regrettable” in an email exchange between the agency and a Web Summit co-founder, correspondence seen by the Business Post reveals.
The incident, which happened at an event held during the 2018 Collision tech conference in New Orleans, allegedly involved Cosgrave “slow clapping” an IDA staff member while she was giving a speech to a room of about 80 people, many of whom were C-suite executives.
According to people with knowledge of the incident, Cosgrave allegedly introduced the woman by commenting on how the role of the IDA was to represent multinationals who “do not pay tax”. While she was delivering some remarks, it is alleged that Cosgrave initiated a slow clap and subsequently took the microphone back from her.
In a November 2018 email from Kevin Sammon, chief of communications for the IDA, to David Kelly, a Web Summit co-founder, the incident was referred to as “particularly regrettable”. Sammon said the incident was previously raised with Connected Intelligence, a name used to refer to the umbrella group of Web Summit conferences and events.
In the email Sammon also took issue with Cosgrave’s claim on social media that the IDA had only purchased one ticket to the Web Summit conference that year.
He said that Cosgrave neglected to mention that the IDA was sending three marketing executives to the conference, and added that the agency believes it has the “correct number of people attending this year following our commercial assessment of the usefulness of this event”.
Sammon also added that since 2009, the IDA had spent more than €700,000 on sponsorship for Web Summit events, and said that he was “surprised and disappointed” that the relationship over many years now seems to mean so little to Web Summit.
“Perhaps the firm has larger contracts now that make IDA Ireland’s contribution and goodwill expendable,” Sammon wrote. “Whatever is going on, I can think of no other commercial arrangement that we have entered into with a conference organiser that has caused us the same issues.”
Just a year prior to the alleged incident in New Orleans, Cosgrave told the Irish Independent that his company’s “most important supporter from the start, by a wide margin, was the IDA”.
Web Summit has since secured many lucrative deals, including €11 million a year from Portugal under a commitment for the conference to remain in Lisbon until 2028.
The IDA declined to comment on the email or the incident when contacted by the Business Post. It is understood that the IDA rowed back on financial support for Web Summit after 2018, and that the incident in New Orleans acted as a catalyst to that.
The reason for the souring of the relationship between Cosgrave and the IDA was the subject of much speculation at the time, especially in light of claims made by Cosgrave on Twitter that the IDA only had one representative attending. He also claimed at the time that Enterprise Ireland had asked the start-ups it backed not to attend. Enterprise Ireland refuted this claim.
The dissolution of the relationship between Web Summit and the IDA is also referenced in legal letters sent by lawyers for Kelly and Patrick Murphy, a fund manager, who Cosgrave is suing in the US. Cosgrave alleges that the pair “secretly” established an investment fund that he claims benefited from its association with the successful Web Summit, but from which it and Cosgrave were excluded.
Cosgrave is also suing Kelly in the Irish High Court in a separate but related case, alleging that he failed in his duties as a director of Web Summit by allegedly soliciting investors into a follow-on fund while working in the role. These claims are denied.
When asked to comment on the allegations concerning a 2018 incident with an IDA representative, a spokeswoman for Cosgrave said the claims are being made purely to distract and deflect from the legal case Web Summit has taken against Kelly for breach of fiduciary duty. She said the claims were “without merit”.
“We look forward to future hearings when matters of fact will be given due consideration,” she said.
Paddy seems to be cut from the same cloth as Denis O’Brien in the litigiousness stakes.
hopefully an isaac wunder wont be too long arriving for both of them
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“Devestating exposé”? That’s right Paddy. Leo’s career is in tatters.
He’s some wind-up merchant. 
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The cunt is actually unraveling.
Who? Paddy or Leo?
Leo is too cute to unravel.
Paddy
Paddy
Paddy