World’s Most Famous Heads of State in Ireland.
The Queen has arrived and so too has a milestone in the process of reconciliation between our two countries. I warmly welcome the British Head of State and believe her visit is long overdue.
I am very privileged to be meeting both Queen Elizabeth and President Obama at functions I will attend in the next few days. The Queen’s itinerary has been published but the final details of President Obama’s visit is a ferociously well guarded secret.
In a professional capacity I am working the members of Moneygall community. Normally this too should have stayed secret until Ollie Hayes the publican in Moneygall told RTE’s John Murray on his radio show last Friday morning. Now everyone knows, thanks Ollie.
Anyway what is my role? For Henry Healy, a relative of Barak Obama who lives in Moneygall, for John Donovan, who owns the ancestral home and for Canon Stephen Neil, the genealogist who established the link between County Offaly and the US President, next Monday is monumentous. These three men will each be interviewed over a thousand times by the world’s media between, say, Saturday and Wednesday next.
I don’t think people have any idea how big an international story this is. My team and I will be on the ground in Moneygall to help them cope with the media tsunami that is about to hit them. It is important that the spokespersons in Moneygall do themselves, their village and Ireland justice. It will be a fantastic few days for Ireland having the two most widely recognised heads of state in the world meeting the warm and friendly people of Ireland and pictures of it all beamed around the world on TV.
As a result of my involvement I have been invited to attend an “intimate function” with the US President but if I told you the details of that here now his secret service would have to shoot me so I will tell you all about it in my next bog update!
Sean Gallagher for the Park
So my great friend, Sean Gallagher, is hoping to run for the Park in November’s Presidential election. The news that he is entering the race appeared in Sunday’s papers. Late on Saturday night I had received a courtesy text from Sean telling me there would probably be something in the papers the next day about his candidacy as an Independent.
Ever the gentleman, Sean was giving his close friends a heads up. Since then I have been amazed at the number of people who said to me he would make a great candidate. I don’t mean to sound surprised but when you know someone so well, after all, we have shared a dressing room on the Dragons’ Den set for three years, it is more difficult to think of him as possibly, “His Excellency, Sean Gallagher, Uachtaran na hEireann”.
However, at a time when employment prospects are dismal, it would be fantastic to have a person in the Aras who understood the importance of people creating a job for themselves rather hoping to be offered one. Separate from our current economic woes, the days of lifelong employment in a firm, ending at age 65 with a pension and a gold watch, are over. Those entering the job market today have to possess a knowledge, skill, service or product they can sell to companies. That’s how many people will earn their living in the future. We have entered the age of the sub contractor and perhaps the only prospect of earning decent, dependable money will be to become self-employed. This is a seismic change in our job structures and requires someone who fully understands and appreciates the challenges facing the self employed and the small and medium sized business operator. For that alone Sean is worthy of serious consideration.
The fact that he also has championed so many, what I will call, disability causes, would also be a benefit to the entire voluntary sector that does such Trojan work throughout Ireland. When people see Sean on the TV they see him as a relaxed, jovial, warm man but they don’t realise the daily struggle Sean has with his greatly impaired vision. Something he has suffered from childhood. In the Den I have to constantly tell Sean what is on the large display board in front of us on the easel. Of course this is always edited out of the programme. He can’t see big letters on a board from fifteen feet. A combination of his ever worsening impaired vision and the bright studio lights leave him blinded. But Sean never complains. He is one of the most positive, uplifting people I have ever met.
He faces a difficult challenge to win an Independent nomination for the Presidency but Sean has a long track record of overcoming challenges. With his energy and self belief he has every chance of succeeding.
Jessie J – Megastar
Pop star, Jessie J was shocked to see so many young girls falling down drunk during her performance at last weekend’s Trinity Ball. She will be in for an even bigger shock this July when she returns to sing at Oxygen, the annual orgy of music and drunkenness for Ireland’s youth. So who is this Jessie J who questions how much we drink? Does she not understand that young Irish people, including girls, love to party and get drunk to the point where they vomit down the front of their ball gowns? What’s your problem Jessie?
Jessie J was hardly known outside of her bedroom just fifteen weeks ago. So, apart from music industry insiders, no one knew about her at Christmas and before this Easter has arrived she is an international phenomenon. She is top of the charts and is being tipped by respected music critics, on both sides of the Atlantic, as the next global music sensation.
So what’s different about Jessie J? First she wasn’t manufactured on some show like The X Factor. She is a real star and they are born not made by some TV company.
Her talent has been nurtured on the West End Stage where she was a child performer. Many of the really big megastars, like Michael Jackson, have all clocked up a lot of stage miles before they go solo. Jessie J has served her time and thus brings an exceptional presence to her live performances, in this regard, on a par with Robbie Williams
She is a prolific songwriter, so prolific that when she writes a hit that doesn’t suit her gospel, which I will come back to later, she gives that hit to other stars such as Mylie Cyrus, or Alicia Keys. Yes, as a teenager Jessie J just happened to write platinum selling hits for the big stars.
She claims she has a catalogue of six hundred songs ready to be released to the world. Oh and by the way she is the best singer on the planet according to Justin Timberlake one of her many, many fans in the music industry. If you need any convincing about her amazing voice, check out her acoustic performances on You Tube. I direct you particularly to the BRMB recording of Price Tag.
But Jessie J isn’t just a singer, she is on a mission. She has a gospel and she is proselytising. She doesn’t drink, smoke or do drugs and she preaches purity. Listen to the lyrics of her current number one Price Tag. The message from Jessie J is we all got carried away in the boom, obsessed with money and bling. She sings it was a bad time “when the sale came first and the truth came second”.
If you watch the music video of Price Tag, you realise she is against materialism, against big fancy cars, against girls in music videos displaying themselves as mere sex objects and so on.
Following economic crashes, societies not only adjust but they overturn the past. “Jessie J-ism” could become the new Victorianism of the 21st Century.
To see where this young woman is coming from watch the iconic music video of the global economic boom, I got a Feeling from the Black Eyed Peas. That’s the one that goes “tonight’s goin’ to be a good, good night”. The song was written just before the Lehman Bros crash that has lead to the banking meltdown in the developed world. It is a most superb anthem to excess. Its message is fill up your cup, let it over flow, if you go out tonight – get smashed. All the scenes in the video feature girl on girl, lesbian action to make it risqué and excessive.
Again check out You Tube and see for yourself that in the last sixty seconds of this video ten girls, not one guy, fall down on the floor or on the street or in the gutter because they are drunk or have overdosed. The message from this music video to young women is you can’t have a good time if you have enough brain cells to recall it the next day.
Jessie J challenges all this. Do it Like a Dude, her first hit, she has explained is partly about how girls make such great efforts to look pretty but still the boys go around with their trousers down around their butts and in hoodies. Maybe the girls should behave badly like the boys or act like dudes. Who You Are, the title track from her first album says to women not be crushed by the air brushed models of the magazines but be yourself because you are special.
It would be a mistake to dismiss her as just a mere singer-songwriter from Essex. Despite all the hype about social networking music is still the soundtrack and staple diet of youth. Songwriters can’t change the world but they do have immeasurable influence. John Lennon’s Imagine hasn’t delivered world peace but from the moment we heard it, the world had changed.
One thing is very clear. Under 25s listen to music radio and their parents, the over 45s, listen to talk radio. The under 25s have already moved on from our economic crash but the over 45s are still looking for someone to blame and venting their anger on radio talk shows. The kids have already got over it. The older generation, their parents can’t get out from underneath it.
Since the economic downturn the music soundtrack has been changing and with that, perhaps, the moral compass of the world’s youth. The male American rappers, partying by the pool with all the sexy girls and showing off their pimped cars and possessions, are fading fast and the purity girls have taken over. Adele, followed by Ellie Goulding and now the campaigner, Jessie J. Coincidentally the last three Brit Award Critics Winners.
Pop music is the ultimate fashion and is ever changing and mega trends come and go. The soft porn era of music videos all started on a Sunday afternoon on the late Vincent Hanley’s MTUSA with Madonna writhing around on that boat in Venice singing “Like a Virgin” and the era officially died in 2011 when Jessie J’s Price Tag lyric posed the question regarding all these soft porn type music videos “Am I the only one getting tired?”
It is far too early to say if Jessie J will have any significant, lasting impact on global youth culture but she is a very different role model than anything we have seen before. So the stage is set at Oxygen for the ultimate music culture battle between, in the red corner, the Lords of Excess, the brilliant Black Eyed Peas, representing the boom and the past and in the blue corner, the challenger, Miss Purity, the awesome, Jessie J representing hope and a new future but not as we know it Jessie.
Are We Now the “Smug” Dragons?
Tonight, RTE 1, 9:30pm, sees programme three of the current series of Dragons’ Den where myself and new Dragon, Norah Casey, are battling one another, yet again, over a potential investment. The audience figures this year are up by about, an amazing, 200,000 viewers across the week on last year. This is, in the main down to, a primetime slot on Sunday nights and a repeat at 8pm on Thursdays.
However I ask the question are we Dragons not looking a bit too smug this year? Here we are in the middle of the mother of all recessions and if someone is prepared to set up a business in these challenging times should they not be lauded rather than be lambasted as happens sometimes in the Den. I can’t excuse it, but even though I am integral part of it, I question the programme’s tone this year.
The producers are obviously feeling the pressure of the primetime slot and only want to feature the brilliant or the barmy. Anything in between is edited down or out. So you only get situations where the Dragons are battling with one another over a very good idea or you get the opposite, us Dragons, giving the false appearance we are queuing up to put the final nail in the coffin of someone’s dream. There is no middle ground because 21st century television demands jeopardy, you must always either win big or lose big.
Of course the producers are constrained by a strict format dictated by the programme owners, Sony Television, who stipulate how it is to be shot. In fairness who could argue with them, their show is now a success in 22 countries, so they know what works and what doesn’t but Ireland is in an unusual place at this time. More than ever start up businesses need to be encouraged and that is still must be the primary objective of Dragons’ Den.
It is alright, perhaps, for the BBC Dragons to be arrogant. That’s the UK but Ireland is still a community, one large family. I fear we, Irish Dragons, may be falling into that trap of appearing arrogant. The opening sequence has each of us with our arms folded, staring down the camera lens. This is the classic, formatted, Dragons’ Den look but for Ireland I would have preferred to see the Dragons with their sleeves rolled up working with some of their previous investments.
Also because it is series three we have all become very comfortable both in the Den and with one another. So if someone comes in and they have forgotten their figures, an all too frequent occurrence, because we five all know one another so well now, we are more likely to look and smile at one another but this can be misinterpreted as perhaps laughing and the promoter struggling in front of us. I know this is never, ever the case but it can appear like that.
These are not excuses it is just setting a record straight. For a fact I know both Sean Gallagher and Bobby Kerr do countless talks for free in Universities, colleges and schools and with Enterprise Boards the length and breadth of the country doing their bit to promote enterprise. Niall O’Farrell, has in my view, in this series made at least two investments because he was taken by the determination and drive of the promoters even if the rest of us saw no hope of a financial return in those two businesses. Norah Casey, who I am only still getting to know, but I can vouch I have witnessed her being very generous in one business dealing.
Another consequence of a primetime slot is the show gets constant promotion. But producers will always pick the sensational lines for a promo’. So when Bobby Kerr asks, “ why do I smell a rat here?” that can be edited to, “I smell a rat here” and worse is repeated in numerous promo’s, out of context, which I believe is not fair to Brian Lesley, the promoter, who was proposing modest charge to people who needed their debts managed.
Programme 2 Preview..
For those who were tuning in for the first time tonight – hope you enjoyed Programme 1 of the Series. On Sunday night’s show – the second of Series 3 we will have a Chocolatiere in the Dragons’ Den. This product has very dainty packaging, so watch-out, it will probably appeal to Niall O’Farrell!
Then we willsee someone working with technology to assist disabled & elderly people in their home.
We see such a wide range of ideas – and certainly this week brings a real ‘left of centre’ idea – which presents itself as a frightening and even possibly intimidating security solution.
Also an inventor paid the Dragons’ Den a visit – claiming he can stop your pipes from freezing in winter.
Did they succeed in securing investments from the Dragons ? – all will be revealed on Sunday night – RTE1 9.35pm ! See you then.