Aisling Owens Nash sees networking as something more purposeful than a room full of introductions. At its best, it is a practical support system, one that helps women to build businesses without stepping away from family life, and one that can strengthen local connections in ways that matter beyond commerce. Listen to the show here (Feb 3) Owens Nash is the founder of The Right Room, a brand built on the belief that well-designed gatherings change outcomes. Her work supports business owners to shape events and experiences that are clear in purpose, well held, and commercially useful, while still feeling human. Alongside her own work, she is Head Networking Leader for MIB International, which she describes as a fast-growing female empowerment network with a deliberate point of difference. “We are a professional networking organisation, with a very big difference in that all of our events are child inclusive,” she says. “We also focus on working with local female business owners in their local communities to boost their local economy, yet we have access to a worldwide network.” The local emphasis is central. It is about access, and about who is overlooked when networking is designed around one kind of life […]
Continue readingAuthor Archive: Jillian Godsil
Wishing Well: Cormac Lucey on Accountability, Ageing and the Price of Drift
Cormac Lucey is an economist, lecturer, and commentator whose career has taken him from financial management in Germany to the front lines of Ireland’s policy debate. He is known for his unflinching analysis of economic systems, his independent thought, and a conviction that many of Ireland’s challenges stem from weak decision-making rather than bad luck. Listen to the radio show here (Jan 20) “I am interested in how power operates: who makes decisions, how they are made, and whether they are accountable,” he said. “In Ireland, too often, we have a system where responsibility is diffused. The outcomes are poor, but nobody is clearly to blame.” Lucey has taught finance, written columns on economics and public affairs, and contributed widely to the national conversation. His concern, he explained, is that the public sphere is narrowing and that debate has become constrained by ideology. “There is an unreflective soft-left bias in much of Irish life,” he said. “It is well-intentioned, but it is also uncritical. It replaces one kind of inequality with another and often avoids asking difficult questions about merit or performance.” He is equally forthright about the European Union. “I admire the European project,” he said, “but it has […]
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Housing, Grief and Practical Solutions: Sinéad Kearns on What the Property Market Really Looks Like
Sinéad Kearns, co-owner of Herman White Properties, meets the housing crisis at the point where people have to make decisions. For many, property is not about timing. It is about the moment life forces a move, after a bereavement, a separation, a growing family, or when a house no longer fits the person living in it. Listen too the radio show here (Jan19) Her route into real estate was direct. “I basically fell into the business. I was unemployed, looking for work, and I ended up coming into admin in an auctioneers in Rathnew, so I started off on reception there,” she said. “I got interested because it was around the same time that I was buying my own home. I could see it from both sides.” That first role became a career. “Over time, they approached me about becoming a qualified agent, and they helped me get onto a course. From then on, I’ve been qualified,” she said. “I’ve worked with Herman White since 2009.” Kearns is careful to explain how regulated the industry now is, because she believes the public often underestimates the oversight. “The PSRA is our licensing body,” she said. “To be able to be a […]
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Making a Difference – Yvonne Reddin: Starting Again
Yvonne Reddin began 2026 in public, with a private truth that struck a nerve. The journalist, travel writer and founder of Storylane PR was a guest on Dublin City FM’s Making a Difference in early January, speaking about an article she had written on dating in her fifties and the response it provoked. Listen to the radio show on here (Jan 12) The piece, titled All I want for Christmas is a snog, was deliberately light in tone. Reddin described it as “tongue in cheek”, but she was clear about the intention behind it. Many women, she said, are restarting their lives in midlife and are not necessarily seeking a relationship, but they do miss the small kindnesses of companionship. “I do miss that side, just the simple little things, even a kiss of the cheek,” she said. “It’s been so long since I had anything like that, and I just kind of feel the kids are growing up now, and maybe it’s time that I shake it up a little bit.” Reddin is raising three children, including twins who are 12, and an eldest son who is 23. Over two decades of single parenting, she said, confidence can take […]
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Making a Difference: Ross Scanlon – A performing career built to last
Ross Scanlon is a tenor soloist and vocal specialist who has built a working life across performance, teaching and coaching. His route into music was formal and practical. He trained at the then DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama in Rathmines, now TU Dublin, before moving to London for postgraduate study at the Royal Academy of Music. “I did my master’s degree in the Royal Academy of Music,” he said, “and then I was very lucky to get a scholarship to study in their Opera Studio there for another two years.” Listen to the radio show here (Jan 5) What was meant to be a short move became a long one. “I ended up doing just under 10 years in London in total,” Scanlon said. He freelanced throughout, working across Ireland and the UK, and credits Opera Collective Ireland with providing an early platform when he returned. Listen to the show here (January 5) Freelance work, he noted, comes in waves. “You can kind of be flavour of the month for a bit,” he said. “I could be busy for six months solidly, and then there could be a massive gap in the calendar.” He described the particular lull that […]
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The Wishing Well: Shane Byrne – Put on This Earth to Play Rugby
For Shane Byrne, rugby and music have always run in parallel. “Music was a constant for me. It was always part of my life,” he recalls, reminiscing about the era of tapes and Discman. His taste, he laughs, is “pretty eclectic,” swinging from heavy metal and rock to Michael Jackson and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, with thousands of tracks on his phone. “I’ve probably got 10,000 songs on my phone. It’s a mishmash. It goes from classical to Michael Jackson to heavy metal.” Listen to the radio show here (December 30th) Music wasn’t just a backdrop for Shane; it was central to his daily life. At school, he learned drums, though he admits, “I’ve made a fool of myself often” when asked to play later in life. “I sang as a tenor,” he adds. “I was in the choir the whole way up through primary school, and then the whole way from start to finish in Blackrock College.” Rugby didn’t come early. When he arrived at Blackrock, rugby was the sport, but he “hadn’t played rugby at all” and was, in his words, “really bad at it.” However, there was one attribute he brought with him: speed. “I had done a […]
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Making a Difference: Paddy’s had his day and Brigit is back
On Making a Difference this week, I spoke with Gillian Henderson, one half of the Jill and Gill duo, alongside her creative partner Jill Deering, the pair behind jillandgill.com. With three Jills in the mix, the naming can get comical quickly, but Henderson is clear about what they are: “a collaborative practice, is probably where we would feel most comfortable.” Listen to the radio programme here (Dec 22) Henderson came into creative work through design rather than art. “I actually studied product and furniture design initially, before adding in graphic design after university,” she says. It was in Dublin, while working, that she first encountered screen printing, and fell for its method and discipline: “I think it led really into my background in design. It was kind of process driven. You kind of had to follow a particular way of doing things.” For anyone who has heard the term but never quite grasped it, she explains screen printing plainly. “You would burn an image into a screen, and it’s a mesh screen, and then you would be able to literally push ink through that and create a print.” The magic, she says, is in repeatability and layering: “you can work […]
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Making a Difference: Unearthing the Past with Dr Ger Moane
Dr Ger Moane is many things: a retired psychology professor, a shamanic practitioner, and now a published novelist. Her debut fiction work, Keeper of Stones, is a meditation on life, identity, and mythology set in Ireland’s deep prehistory. Speaking with Dublin City FM, Moane shared insights into her transition from academic writing to creative storytelling, and how her work explores both ancient wisdom and modern themes. Listen to the show here (December 15) “I had to learn the craft of storytelling,” she said, reflecting on the decade it took to write the novel. “You can write a story, but that doesn’t mean it’s good. I had to figure out how to create character, tension, and drama.” Moane is no stranger to the written word, having authored academic books and countless articles over her long career at UCD. Yet fiction was a new territory, requiring a different rhythm and emotional intensity. Her novel is set around Newgrange, the 5,000-year-old monument older than the pyramids or Stonehenge, and intricately aligned with the rising sun during the Winter Solstice. “The monument has never let in water in all those years,” she remarked. “The engineering precision is astonishing. The sun shines into the chamber […]
Continue readingMaking a Difference: Brian McGleenon on Writing, Films and the Long Road to Housejackers
Brian McGleenon grew up in Armagh in the 1980s and 1990s, a place and time that shaped his eye for detail and his instinct for story. Today he is a journalist and screenwriter living in the UK, working at the intersection of news, culture and film. It has not been a straight line. His writing life has been forged through obsession, restlessness and a willingness to pursue the story wherever it leads. Listen to the show here (Dec 8th) “I don’t think I was always a writer,” he says. “I was more of a drawer of pictures.” The habit of watching closely, of observing and framing, stayed with him. Writing arrived later, during his teens, when he discovered film as a language. His epiphany was Taxi Driver, which he watched repeatedly. “I probably watched it about 80 times,” he admits, laughing at the memory. “My mum banned it from the house.” McGleenon describes these periods as creative fixations. One film will grip him, and he will watch it obsessively until he has extracted something essential from it. “A good movie,” he says, “invigorates your whole idea of what life’s about.” From Architecture to Storyboards to Journalism His professional path zigzagged. […]
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Wishing Well: Conor Walton Painting the Music of the Universe
For Conor Walton, painting has never been just a craft. It is a philosophical inquiry, a childhood instinct refined into adult discipline, and a lifelong effort to render visible what he calls the “cosmic harmony” that underpins the world. A painter based in Arklow, Conor’s work spans realism, symbolism, and imaginative invention, resisting easy categorisation while welcoming curiosity. Listen to the radio show here (December 2nd) Growing up as the youngest of seven, Conor drew constantly. “Any chance I got, I was on the floor with paper and pencils,” he recalls. Art was encouraged, if not practised, in his home. His parents valued beauty, and his eldest sister Eorna, also an artist, became an early mentor. Yet when Conor entered art school at NCAD, the experience was not the straightforward continuation of childhood talent he had imagined. He encountered an environment in transition. Traditional techniques, once core to European academies, had been swept away in the 1960s. “What they wanted to teach was expression, not technique,” he says. The new conceptualist teachers saw technical training as restrictive; Conor saw it as essential. The clash was formative. “They thought I was the Antichrist. I wanted skills. They wanted ideas.” The criticism […]
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