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COMPUTER DEVELOPER

“NGOs that are really good and efficient should survive and grow, and those which really don’t add value and can’t be competitive should wind up. You’re wasting money that could be applied to the poorest people in the world in a much more efficient way. Unless you can do it efficiently, I don’t think you should be in this business.”

Sunday Business Post, August 3, 2008

CHARITY IN A PC WORLD

Cormac Lynch’s charity supplies computers to the poor in Africa, but he admits his capitalist instincts are the reason for his great success.

The Irish love to play games that involve degrees of separation. For example, plenty of us can map out, in three or four steps, a link to the likes of Bono with little effort. Dubliner Cormac Lynch, founder of Irish charity Camara, is a master of the art – taking us from the world’s poorest people to the world’s super-rich in two short steps. Continue reading “COMPUTER DEVELOPER”

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Asleep at the Table

If your taxi driver had  been awake for the guts of 57 hours, would you be happy to let him drive you home? No?

What about if your doctor had been awake for 57 hours – would you let them take out your appendix?

Didn’t think so.

Sunday Business Post, August 07, 2005

Working around the clock, grabbing a snooze when there’s a lull in the action, going without meals and pepping themselves up with caffeine – how long can Ireland’s over-worked junior doctors keep going under these conditions? ‘You wouldn’t want your mother or father on that operating table,” says the junior doctor, yawning down the phone. Continue reading “Asleep at the Table”

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John Cuts Himself

Every now and then you do a piece that catches you in the throat. This piece stemmed from an interview with a blogger who was tackling some intensely personal stuff on his blog about his own self-harm, which he has now ditched as he has stopped harming. Result.

Sunday Business Post – Jan 26, 2006

John cuts himself. He takes a razor blade, draws its edge slowly across his upper arm until it parts the skin and glides smoothly, steely into the soft flesh beneath. He says that when he sees the blood, it feels good; it feels like the sting of sunburn and a release of pressure. Continue reading “John Cuts Himself”

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Play the hand you’re dealt

Last week I took a bunch of college students back to school. After three hours of poker, I stood up and walked away with 70 of their softly-bludged euros. It was a rare, rare win.

While I was busy fleecing them, we got talking about work, and the fact that I’m back freelancing again. The lads started asking me about what articles I most enjoyed researching. I’m not a big poker player, but when I mentioned a long feature on student poker, and promptly scooped another hefty pot of chips, there was a collective groan. He’s a fucking shark.

The article appeared on the front of the Agenda magazine while I was still a student myself.

Sunday Business Post, Feb 27, 2005

Poker School

It’s 7.30pm and the last of 270 students are trickling through the doors of the Gresham Hotel. Ten to a table, they sit and make guarded small talk, eyeing each other nervously.

With a top prize of €1,500 on the line, there’s little time for making friends, and everyone is anxious to get down to business. Niall Hughes of Trinity College’s Card Society announces to much applause, that the prize fund has reached €6,500. Continue reading “Play the hand you’re dealt”

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“When my clients die of Aids … I count those deaths as victories”

It’s not easy to like a man who says things like that. Even less when he fills a book with similar throwaway phrases and sundry self-aggrandising sop, and you have to read the whole thing and turn in a review at the end.

I like reading books. I count book reviews as a perk of working in journalism, but this death row lawyer-cum-author made me want to fly to Texas just in the hope I’d get to punch him.

Sunday Business Post, January 31, 2010

David R Dow, the high profile death-row lawyer responsible for Killing Time: One Man’s Race to Stop an Execution, would have us believe he is among the highest ranks of legal martyr. His job is, after all, an endless moral conflict. Continue reading ““When my clients die of Aids … I count those deaths as victories””