Paddy Cosgrave Interview

There are a number of framed photographic portraits of famous scientists, economists, mathematicians, philosophers, physicists and other influential thinkers lining the reception wall of the Web Summit’s impressive Dartry Road headquarters.
As Hot Press enters the building alongside controversial CEO Paddy Cosgrave, the bearded, bespectacled and imposingly tall 32-year-old points to one of them and challenges me, “Can you name him?”
The immediate impression is that he does this quite a lot. As it happens, I immediately identify American linguist Noam Chomsky. Others hanging on this wall of intellectual fame include philosopher Bertrand Russell, ill-fated WW2 codebreaker Alan Turing and Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.
Cosgrave also considers himself something of an anarchist, although the Wicklow-born entrepreneur is “not saying there shouldn’t be rules – only that existing rules and systems should always be tested and challenged.”
Listed 18th in Wired magazine’s 2015 list of the most influential Europeans in the field of technology, Cosgrave has certainly shaken things up. Over the last few years, his Web Summit brainchild has grown from a small localised start-up to a major international event. Having attracted just 400 mostly Irish tech types at its inaugural run in 2010, this year’s sold-out event – which takes place from November 3-5 in the RDS – is expected to attract almost 30,000 attendees from over 110 countries.
Next year, following a much publicised breakdown in communications with the Irish government, Cosgrave is moving the entire Web Summit from Dublin to Lisbon. There was uproar when he publicly released the fraught email correspondence between himself and the Taoiseach’s office. His supporters blame the incompetence of the coalition, while his detractors accuse him of unpatriotic petulance. The controversy is still raging in the media as we meet.
The Portuguese are offering a blatant €1.3million sweetener. Quite possibly, this amount is now small change to Cosgrave. The Web Summit is currently employing 140 people, most of whom are working in this building (a converted old tram station). Cosgrave shows me around the two floors of open plan offices. With the Web Summit imminent, it’s a hushed environment, permeated by an air of intense concentration. Just about everybody is perched in front of a laptop.
“So are all of these people scared of you?” I ask, as photographer Kathrin Baumbach shoots some pictures. “No, of course not,” he insists, with a tight smile. “They all love me.”
As with the American tech companies, it’s a somewhat quirky workspace (there’s even a little Jack Russell padding around). He offers me a coffee from the barista in the corner. “Are you sure you won’t have one? This guy’s an absolute genius with coffee!” Cosgrave claims to only hire the best, no matter what position is being filled.
We do the interview in an enclosed upstairs space they call “Granny’s Good Room.” It’s designed to look like a typical 1970’s Irish suburban living room, complete with ugly couches, an untouched bottle of sherry on the corner cabinet, and a big Sacred Heart picture on the wall.
OLAF TYARANSEN: What’s your earliest memory?
PADDY COSGRAVE: That’s a good question... (long pause). Just probably playing outside as a kid in Wicklow.
You grew up on a farm?
Yeah. One brother, one sister, two parents. I’m the eldest. So I’ve got a younger brother who has coincidently just moved to Lisbon. Independently obviously; he’s his own man. He lived in Berlin for the last three years. He’s an engineer. I have a little sister who’s seven years younger. She works in Dublin.
What type of farm was it?
It was a dairy farm, so I saw my dad milk cows.
Did you work on it?
I did work on it from time to time, but my dad – aside from milking cows and the daily obligations of farming, which aren’t particularly glamorous – probably never really took a holiday in 25 years. I never went on a holiday abroad with my parents. He was just obsessed with computers, he thought computers were the future. So from the day I was born, we had all of the first Apples. I still have a working Mac SE at home from 1988.
Was he looking at computers from a farming perspective?
No, he just liked to code. Now he’s retired and he contributes to open source projects full-time. He was determined that his kids were going to learn about computers. The only time we were asked to do anything on the farm was when the cows got out. He just didn’t want us farming.
What age where you when you learned to programme in Basic?
Well, my dad persuaded my secondary school to teach programming in first year, so everybody learned BBC Basic, which was an easier to learn programming language. At the time it was in a number of schools in the UK – it just wasn’t in Ireland. Here, there was usually one computer in a school that was kept in a box under lock and key.
Was it a happy childhood?
I had a great childhood. My parents just let me do what I wanted to do. I went to boarding school when I was 12 years of age.
Glenstall Abbey, wasn’t it?
Yeah, it was a pretty philosophical place. They just let you do your own thing. I wasn’t that interested in school. I remember when I was 11 somebody stayed in our house and left a copy of a book, Towards A New Cold War by Noam Chomsky. I used to just love to read books. I wasn’t that interested in fiction and I loved National Geographic, just anything about the world. I started to read this book and I had no idea what it was about, so I read it again and I still had no idea what it was about. But I thought it was important, so I asked my dad to get me more books by Noam Chomsky. That was in the end of primary school. So I just started reading everything that Chomsky ever wrote. And Bertrand Russell and Howard Zinn. I mean you just had so much free time in a boarding school. As long as you’re not setting things on fire they just generally left you alone.
What age were you when you had your first drink?
Probably 12 or something like that. My parents would have just said, “If you want to taste beer or wine...” There was no taboo around alcohol. If there’s a taboo around something it almost turns it into this substance that people can very easily go on to abuse. Whereas if it’s just normalised, it’s like, “What’s the big deal?”
I know you don’t smoke because you refused my offer of one outside...
No, I never did. Both of my parents smoked from the age of nine or ten until about three years ago. My mom, basically just by chance, discovered a blood clot. It was a complete and utter fluke. She went to a doctor, said she woke up with a pain around her calf and it now felt like it was above her knee.The doctor told her to go home and that she’d be fine. My mom was so sure that they got in a car and drove up to a hospital in Dublin. By the time she got there it was in her hip and the doctors were like, “Ok, that’s weird. We need to get you a scan.” They did the scan and saw that the clot was moving up through the main artery. They injected her with Warfarin and as they were doing that they took more scans of her body and they found two other clots on her lungs. So she would have either had a heart attack or a stroke. The doctor said, “Stop smoking” and she was like, “Ok!” So my dad stopped as well.
Did you ever try any drugs?
Yeah, yeah (nods). People take drugs for all sorts of reasons. It’s escapism, it’s sometimes to experience different things. My escape is just my mind and my meditation is underlining stuff. I just love to underline shit in books. Some people like to travel, I’m perfectly happy just reading. I think that’s a way to transport yourself to other worlds or to other parts of the world or to other times.
Presumably you’ve tried LSD?
That seems to be the thing everybody involved in tech should say, but no, I’ve never tried LSD.
Really?
No. I’ve listened to LCD Soundsystem but I haven’t taken LSD! (laughs) Or acid, or any of these things. While I was in college, I was so intrigued by it, I invited a kind of very forgotten character in history called Alexander Shulgin. He’s famous because he’s basically responsible for all psychedelic compounds. Like literally almost all of them. He resynthesised MDMA, which he would be most famous for, but he worked for the DEA identifying different compounds.
He just died last year.
Yeah. He was testing relentlessly on himself, all of these different psychedelic compounds because he believed that they had all sorts of benefits. He eventually, frustrated by the unwillingness of the establishment to accept that psychedelic compounds could have profoundly positive effects on people, released his own ‘cookbooks’. If you read details of a lot of DEA busts in the United States, Alexander Shulgin’s books tend to be sitting there in the library of two books in these labs.
Did you invite him personally?
Yeah, I persuaded him to fly over from the United States to speak. We used the biggest space that the society had, The Phil, and it wasn’t just students, it was academics that brought his book to sign. These are chemists and pharmacists: it was fascinating to see people ask him questions like, “What do you think is best for watching sunsets? Or looking at flowers? Or listening to drum and bass?” He was like an encyclopedia. He’d tell you the exact compound. Now most people in the room had no idea how to synthesise these compounds but you could watch these academics nodding their heads and noting things down and you’d think: ‘they’ll probably go home this weekend and make some compound that opens their mind’. I know somebody in the field of cryptography, and some of the ideas that they are most known for come from taking acid and just walking the streets of the city they’re in. It just opens different doors. So for me, I feel that there is enough chaos in my mind that I just embrace it and I just go wherever it takes me.
Ever tried coke?
No.
Really?
No.
Were you a smart student in school or were you distracted?
Totally distracted. I was close to being the worst student in first year in school. Whatever was on my course I was pretty sure that that was sterile, so I would just look for other things. I can’t even explain the thrill I got from reading about things. Whether it’s the origins of Hinduism or The Origins of the Species... You’re in school so you should be interested in theories of education and pedagogical ideas, whether they’re ideas by John Dewey who deeply influenced the American educational system or they’re slightly more radical ideas from South American thinkers like Paolo Freire who wrote books like Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
You edited the college magazine in Trinity. You obviously had an interest in media?
I went to college, but I thought the most exciting things were happening outside of the lecture hall. Getting involved in societies and publications was a way of experiencing other things. Everybody had to do the course work and exams, but it was optional – all of these other things that you could discover.
While at Trinity, you invited a lot of famous people over for the Phil. Who was your biggest coup?
I think there are people who are thoughtful people, I don’t necessarily have to agree with them – like Joseph Nigh. He’s more known for a term called ‘soft power’ that we use nowadays. Neil Ferguson, a British historian who works at Harvard – he might be on the other side of the spectrum than Noam Chomsky. Alexander Shulgin, that was just fascinating to listen to. A scientist and the way he was castigated in the way the orthodoxy assumes is a bad thing, that this is a heretic. I think eventually history will judge him quite favourably. He died on the margins of science, unfortunately. The people who are alternative to their times, who end up dying on the fringes, they’re only celebrated afterwards. They’re usually like Galileo, “What a crazy idea!” It turned out he was right, in a way. So some of these more alternative characters were more interesting.
Did you get a job after college?
No, I never wanted to get a job. There was no grand plan for what I was going to do, I was just interested in wandering. I don’t think it was until the last few years that I figured out that many of the things that I’ve done could all be...(pauses) It’s like, I got involved in The Phil because I heard that there would be free booze on the first week of freshers’ week. I went along to a debate with my mates – now I had an interest in debating, I saw these 21-22 year olds stand up and I was just like, “Oh my God! They’re not shy, this is unbelievable.” And I hung around long enough that they couldn’t get rid of me. I slowly learned to be a very bad public speaker and I organised lots of debates.
You were involved in the Rock The Vote campaign in 2007?
Yeah. As I was leaving college at the end of 2006 I was working on an idea with a friend called Paul Campbell, who built Tito, which is the ticketing software that we use. We were working on this advertising platform, just toying around with the idea. Then I met this guy by chance in Lenin at the bottom of Dawson Street, who I overheard saying that he had bought Kilternan Hotel, so I had to say to him that it was cursed, that it was a fool’s mission, it would not work out. He was really intrigued. Just by chance, the guy that I was named after was the only guy to own Kiltenan Hotel that made any money out of it, ever. He only owned it for a handful of years and then he sold it. His name was Patrick Cosgrave and he was my grand-uncle. He was a butcher and he was just a creative butcher and he ended up owning a few hotels. So that’s how I got to know Hugh O’Regan.
And...
Hugh was this magical character. Some people thought he was crazy but, if he was crazy, he was just the right sort of crazy. He had a passion just for doing things. He didn’t really care about making money. He didn’t see the utility of money beyond having a house and your family being happy. We became friends and used to meet up and talk a lot. He was very passionate about Dublin. He was a publican and he sold all of his pubs, the Thomas Reid Group, and bought the Kilternan Hotel, which he wanted to build into something great. He persuaded me, after getting to know him for a few months, that I should stop building software, and creating a company, and I should do something good. He would give me a free office and €60,000 into my bank account. That was just a year where I should step back and do something that I thought was a positive thing.
So he gave you sixty grand?
Yeah. I didn’t actually believe him and then he did put €60,000 into my bank account, which was weird because I’d never normally have more than €100 in my account and would constantly get ATM fear. I moved up to 14 St Stephen’s Green and I didn’t know what to do. I’d done politics and economics, sociology. I noticed that in every election for the past 35 years the youth vote had declined. I thought maybe we could change that. So there were two ways of changing that: one was to create a kitsch, slightly ironic campaign that would get people talking or thinking about youth participation, and then the real value would be contained in a website called mycandidate.ie, which was just a very simple-to-use site that contained all 488 candidates standing in the Irish General Election. It would have biographical information and policy details.
Who put that together?
Mick Cullinane who now programmes the big stage at the Web Summit. We’d worked on the magazine Piranha together in college. Then there was a guy called Andrew Paine who’s now in the Taoiseach’s press office and we’d edited stuff in college together. So Andrew did all the research, Mick did all the coding and I... didn’t really do anything! We gave a modified version of mycandidate.ie in what’s called an iframe, like YouTube, to the Irish Times, to RTE and others. So they had their own electoral portals and it looked like it was RTE’s own thing, but it was us serving up all this information and they promoted it hugely. That was the real success of that period. Unfortunately Hugh’s not around anymore and I’ll just really miss him.* I’ll miss all of those walks and talks about things you don’t get to walk and talk about with most other people.
Let’s fast forward to the Web Summit. It’s gone from a minor to major event in just a few short years.
The Web Summit happened pretty much by accident, because of Paul Campbell who’s behind Tito, asking me to get involved. I did on the basis that I could get more people to use the software. Until 2012 we were still in a sitting room in Ranelagh. From there I met more big tech conference organisers, and other types of conferences around Europe and the United States. I assumed that as conferences got really big people would use software to make them better.
How do you mean?
When it’s just 200 people it’s quite easy to find the people that you want to meet. You use your eyes, that’s your software. When it gets to 3,000 people what’s the point in an alphabetical attendee list? There’s five Alan’s. Who’s the right person? You just don’t know. I actually couldn’t believe that all of these large conferences were bereft, is that the word? There was just no software. And yet you had LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, who years before had solved the problem of who to recommend that you follow or you friend or you add based on a field of mathematics called graph theory and they built what are called recommender systems. So you go on Twitter and you’re engaging with a certain type of content or engaging with a certain type of person and they’ll say, “Hey, here’s some other people you might want to follow,” out of 200 million people on Twitter. If they can do it in the online world, you can absolutely do it in the offline world.
Give me an example of that...
At the very first Web Summit, when I had to do dinner for 200 people for three nights, and a pub crawl, I hired this event manager and asked them what the best software was to optimally seat people – to assign them tables and assign them pub crawls. So then when my friend Kev Cunningham, who I used to live with – I live with five other people, it’s not a commune, it’s just a shared house – he really built this convenient brute force algorithm to randomly optimise who was sitting at what table at what dinner. Now that’s got a lot more sophisticated. Many of the people downstairs have PhDs in an area of physics called complex systems and so everything that we do has become a lot more... (Holds up smartphone and starts scrolling) This is an example, this is our recommender system. Out of the 30,000 attendees at Web Summit, these are the people it’s telling me that I should connect with. These are the speakers, out of the 600 speakers, that I would be most interested in. This is a random selection of people in Ireland that I might be interested in connecting with, then these are
the start-ups that it thinks, based on my interests, that I would be most interested in. That’s based on a machine driven analysis on everything I’ve shared, favourited and retweeted on Twitter.
It looks at the types of stuff I’m most interested in and the types of people that I follow. That might seem like it couldn’t make any sense but that’s what Facebook does. How do they decide what to show on your newsfeed when you follow 20,000 people? It couldn’t just be chronological, it would be a mess! They actually figure out what’s the most interesting content to you. The experience of a 30,000 person conference anywhere in the world has been, to date, just organised chaos. All we’re trying to do is engineer the serendipity or the chaos that happens with 30,000 people. A music concert is different. People are there to see Bob Dylan, they’re there to see U2 – it’s not so important who’s around you. Arguably, if it’s a three-day music festival, helping people find acts that may be of interest to them that they don’t know about, that’s helpful.
The Web Summit is moving to Lisbon next year. Why did you decide to announce it the way you did?
We’d been giving all of the cities that we’d been working with a hard deadline of the 23rd of September. That was always going to be the date that we would announce where the 2016 Web Summit would be. At the scale we’re now operating, it’s not just for attendees, but it’s also for many of the speakers and the partners – they’re busy people and they plan, not years in advance, but definitely almost a year in advance. I just felt that it was the right time to do it, about six weeks before. It also makes Dublin all the more special in that people know that they’re having this unique experience in this city for the very last time.
You’re obviously not impressed with the Irish government’s response?
Saddened about it all, really (shakes head). It is what it is, as they say. We’ve been approached for a number of years to move the Web Summit – even after the first event in 2010, we held a meeting with another government, in another country. Over time, obviously as the event has grown beyond what anybody expected, the number of countries approaching us – and the value that they saw in the event for their cities – has increased.
Some of your requests seemed quite unreasonable. For example, surely a hotel is a private business? They can’t have a price limit imposed on them by the government.
There’s already a price limit imposed on them by the government, under section 43 of the relevant act in 2003. It’s just that it’s not necessarily enforced.
What do you mean?
They have to publish their highest rates clearly in those hotels, and then they can’t go above those rates. Which is what happens elsewhere in Europe. So in the case of every single country that approached us, just as the most basic things, they could say, “We work with our hotels regularly to attract events from all over the world. What we can do is go to the Hotel’s Federation and say, ‘Hey, you can have normal occupancy for this week of the year or you can have super-normal occupancy. For super- normal occupancy we will take 30%, 40%, 50%, 60% of your inventory and we will lock it away, at a fair market price, for all these international attendees, to make it competitive because as the Hotel Federation we believe that the benefit is to a whole range of stakeholders, such as taxi drivers, who cannot change their prices just because it’s busier than usual; restaurants who don’t have the ability to jack their rates four times over. They also have a stake in this as well, not just you guys’. This is for the city and for the city to make this work on a weekly basis. If you think about it Ireland doesn’t have a conference industry, but if you go to Amsterdam or Barcelona it’s like clockwork.
So Ireland doesn’t have a conference industry?
It’s an industry that’s underdeveloped here and as a consequence you can understand why these are not things that they might understand. Regarding Wi-fi in the hotels, it was one of the most basic things that all of them said: “We can guarantee you that it works and by the way it’s now like electricity in all of these convention centres in that it’s free and it works. So, you’ll be fine.”
Did you not know that the Wi-fi wasn’t going to work properly in the RDS last year?
We were told it would work and you’ll see the statements from the RDS on Friday last that they’ve invested heavily and that their underlying infrastructure is world class and it will work.
And why didn’t it work?
I don’t know. You should probably talk to other events that have been held there that may or may not have experienced the same things. If they’re allowed to legally talk about it.
Are you suggesting that somebody deliberately scuppered the RDS Wi-fi?
Oh no, I’ve no idea, I don’t know (shakes head). Twitter’s not the most reliable source when you watch people say that something isn’t working. To be fair to the RDS, there were two areas where the Wi-fi didn’t work and they were heavily trafficked areas. Everywhere else the Wi-fi was fine and every exhibitor was on a wire connection. There were restrictions: we asked that the mobile operators be allowed to install 3G and 4G towers, mobile version, to boost the signal, but there were complications around that last year. I’m hopeful that those complications will not exist this year.
You also requested Garda escorts for VIP guests.
Yeah, well they were offered to us and given to us in the past. That list is a wish list that we were instructed to place in writing, literally if we could have the moon and the stars, what would we ask for? I think people knock the civil service, but the civil service are very smart people. In the past, the State very kindly provided Garda escorts for busses of delegates going out to meet the President in 2011. So the precedent has existed for many, many years.
The public perception was that it was pampered tech billionaires wanting to be being treated like royalty at taxpayer’s expense.
Absolutely, yeah I think so. It’s kind of a question that we have to ask ourselves as a nation. Are we comfortable rolling out the red carpet for other people? Greeting them off a plane with a red carpet? When maybe we don’t roll out the red carpet for our own people. When you read the emails, the thrust of the emails is talking about trade. For me what is fascinating is that we don’t do trade as a country: we’re not a trading nation. As a consequence, the fact that the British were all over Web Summit whilst the Irish State were not doesn’t seem to have resonated at all. That’s the issue.
Though the Irish government did give you money...
The issue is not whether they gave money or not, it’s what they did with that. So they’ve paid for exhibition stands. They call it State aid. Now the problem is that they’re giving State aid to events in the United States as well, which seems like a bizarre thing. In fact they’re paying commercial fees, much the same as they pay commercial fees to Arthur Cox, much the same as the Israeli government and the British government provide us with commercial fees. So you’re going to have an exhibition stand and you’re going to have side events: what are you going to do with them to maximise opportunities? It’s very clear what the Dutch, the Israelis, the Swedes, the British do at web summits. But what they do is very distinct to what the Irish do, I think, and again this is in the emails.
How so?
If you’re going to go on a trade mission to France at great expense to the tax payer, when there is an opportunity to go on a trade mission down the street at virtually no expense, I think going down the street and doing what the British are doing is probably a good idea.
You’ve said that you were invited to 10 Downing Street?
Yeah, multiple of times.
Who were you meeting?
David Cameron has, over the course of his time in office, had three senior advisors on technology; Rohan Silva, Tim Luke and a guy called Hopkins. Both Rohan and Tim I’ve met on a number of occasions and we’ve worked with them.
Have you ever met Cameron?
I have never met David Cameron, no.
Why could the event not have been kept in Ireland?
When we announced that it was going to be Lisbon, on the next flight leaving Amsterdam, the Dutch sent somebody on that plane and they arrived on the same day, and they came to the office and met with my co-founder. They spent the rest of the day and the evening trying to understand: we didn’t choose Amsterdam, so how can we do this better as a city in the future? Maybe not for you guys, they said, but more likely for other people. And so it was a very candid opportunity. The reaction in Ireland by the government was not to talk to us, but to talk to the media as an intermediary to voters. Either that underlines how important it was, because they were worried what voters would think, or it underlines that there’s just a different approach here to this type of thing.
I assume you’ve become very wealthy from the Web Summit?
Well, I have a 14-year-old car (shrugs). My bike was stolen and I haven’t replaced it, and I live with five other people so, yeah.
This is all by choice though, isn’t it? Could you buy a brand new car in the morning?
I don’t know. I don’t really care either. It’s just not my thing.
Is money not important to you?
Maybe I’ve been fortunate that I’ve got to meet people who have made spectacular amounts of money, and I’ve become acutely aware that not only does it not make any difference to their happiness and – this might sound crazy – but it’s almost like a curse on their sanity. You’ve probably seen it with musicians. Something happens.
Well, everyone wants a piece of you when you become really rich.
Yeah, but your own kind of happiness and your place in the universe, you start just... I don’t know. I’ve seen it over and over again. At 12-years of age I never wanted to be a business person. I’m not interested in being a business person. That’s not my schtick. I’m interested in making things and doing things properly (Paddy goes on to talk at great length about the science behind the length of lanyards).
Were you surprised by the backlash?
What backlash?
When you announced that you were moving to Lisbon.
I was driving up to Donegal as it was all happening. It was the Friday and it was announced on the Thursday. I’m driving and I get out to fill the car up with petrol outside of Sligo. I fill it up, go to the bathroom and come out and pay for some stuff and the guy asks if I’m the guy from that Summit thing? I didn’t know what was coming but he goes, “Can I shake your hand?” He was just basically, “Fair play, I went up to Dublin to protest Irish Water. It wasn’t really about Irish Water but I wanted to show that I was pissed off with things. Do you think the Irish press could understand why hundreds of thousands of people were marching on the streets of Dublin? Absolutely not.” So I was like, “OK, I’ll get back in my car now.” He just said, “Keep it up,” or whatever. I got back in my car and that seemed all a bit confusing, it didn’t seem to relate at all. I got to Donegal and I had to go to bed early because it was a big wedding and people kept coming up to me shaking my hand and asking for my picture. That never happened to me in my life before.
Why were they shaking your hand?
I asked them and they’d say, “That’s such a disgrace, what happened.” And I thought, “Didn’t these people read the Irish Times?” It makes me wonder how close the established press is to the people in this country. In the US they can’t understand Bernie Sanders; in the UK they can’t understand Jeremy Corbyn. I felt two reactions. I’ve seen PR people and political people write things, and of course they react terribly – why shouldn’t they? The other reaction is that I get in taxis, and I meet people on the streets in Dublin 6 and maybe people won’t shout bad things across the street at me, but people will shout good things. Maybe that’s the bias. But I think people understand and they’re not stupid and they’re suspicious now of any government almost anywhere in the world. It’s not an Irish thing, by the way. If you look at the trust barometers, there’s an increasing distance between established institutions and everybody else. When something bad happens and these people up here say, “How dare they, this guy should go back to milking cows in Wicklow,” I think the public go, “Hold on a second.” I could be totally wrong. It could be biased because people will not shout “You fucker!” across the street...
That’s not the case in my experience!
OK, fine! Maybe they will, “Your fucking review! You trashed the Arctic Monkeys!” (laughs)
Finally, do you have a motto in life?
I always say it – I think people are chasing a place, they think there’s a destination called happiness and they think they have to work really hard to get there. I don’t think there is a destination. I just think you won’t find happiness when you get there, but you might find it along the way.
*Hugh O’Regan was one of Ireland’s best known publicans. He established the Thomas Read group of pubs, which included Pravda, Ron Black’s, Searson’s, The Bailey, The Budda Bar, The 40 Foot and Lincoln’s Inn, among others. He died in November 2012, when his body was found, near his car on the N11 dual carriageway, close to Newtownmountkennedy, in Co. Wicklow.