The curious case of Paddy Cosgrave's missing chickens and the fight against corruption

The Web Summit boss had a lot to get off his chest at a press conference today.

By Conor McMahon Deputy editor, Fora

PADDY COSGRAVE’S CHICKENS have gone missing – and the ‘golden circle’ of corruption may or may not be to blame.

At a briefing in the people’s forum, otherwise known as the Shelbourne, the Web Summit boss extends an open invitation to visit the company’s Dartry Road headquarters and have a poke around the gardens that once housed four or five chickens before they disappeared without a trace.

“You’re always very welcome,” he tells the gathering of journalists – or ‘muckrakers’ as he bills them –  and tech enthusiasts. “We’ve got vegetable patches.”

A titter from the audience, and then it’s on to more serious stuff: conferences and corruption.

The latter has been high on Cosgrave’s agenda since last week after he shared a 60-second video on the topic, but it has been on his mind since he was just a chap.

“For anybody I went to secondary school with,” he says, “I used to bore them to death as a teenager with my disdain and obsession for what I see as a system that has persisted in this country a little bit longer than some other advanced, Western nations.”

MONEY CONF Paddy Cosgrave in the Shelbourne
Source: Sam Boal/Rollingnews.ie

He says that he has encountered corruption “from a very young age at a very significant level”.

“It was just wild.”

When asked by Fora to elaborate on the kind of wrongdoing he witnessed as a child, Cosgrave says: “I grew up in Wicklow. If you’ve been reading the papers in Wicklow, whatever’s wrong in Wicklow at the moment was significantly magnified in the 1990s.”

He doesn’t go any further than that, although one can only assume the reference is to the local council’s recent corruption scandal. The People newspaper will be sold out this week.

‘Modest’ measures

To help in the fight against official wrongdoing, Cosgrave says that for the past three years he has been working on a series of “very, very modest” measures to encourage the government to push through long overdue anti-corruption legislation.

The main weapon in his arsenal? A letter – signed by some of the most influential individuals in the world.

Cosgrave has been fielding calls for the past 36 hours from the chief executives of some of the world’s biggest companies, many of which have “very large operations in Ireland”.

But he’s “very, very optimistic” it won’t have to come to that. Did Paddy just challenge Leo to a game of chicken?

9940 Cabinet Meetings_90512643 Taoiseach Leo Varadkar
Source: Sam Boal/RollingNews.ie

Libel laws

Other plans to help crush corruption in Ireland include a workshop for “local and community-based journalists” to teach them the craft of investigative reporting.

“If you look at trust for the media in the western world, Ireland is kind of in the relegation zone,” Cosgrave say. The muckrakers at the front of the room keep their game faces on. We are outnumbered by tech whizzes.

“That’s not because our journalists are incredible untrustworthy,” a sigh of relief, “it’s because the (libel) laws in this country make it very, very difficult for our journalists to hold some of our politicians, and some people like me, to account.

“It leaves them in a situation where they can only write about things in pretty confined parameters.”

What kind of stories get churned out when the media’s in a straightjacket?

“Pathetic arguments that are completely meaningless and don’t in any way question or undermine the status quo,” Cosgrave says, “They’re kind of childish arguments that don’t really exist between a former taoiseach and somebody selling tickets.”

He did say that Moneyconf’s move to Ireland had nothing to do with Enda.

90318969_90318969 Cosgrave and Enda Kenny
Source: Mark Stedman/Photocall Ireland

‘Great, great friends’

Which leads us to the main reason the press conference was called in the first place – although the topic was very much relegated to an also-ran.

The fintech event – one of six conferences under Cosgrave’s wing – is moving from Madrid to Dublin from next year. It will be here to stay “for the foreseeable future”.

The venue of choice is the RDS, the old battleground, which lost the main Web Summit conference in 2015 because it didn’t have the capacity to handle the event’s growth ambitions.

“I’m great, great friends with the management there, even if I’ve never given that impression before,” Cosgrave says.

Moneyconf is much more modest affair, tipped to attract at least 5,000 people next year. There will be 60,000 at Web Summit.

So between organising global conventions and conquering corruption, what else is on Paddy’s plate?

“Six months ago I had a baby, or eight months ago my wife had a baby,” he says, presumably tired. “They’re great and I’m a very aberrant father.”

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