{"id":290736,"date":"2026-01-18T10:50:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-18T10:50:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/290736\/"},"modified":"2026-01-18T10:50:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-18T10:50:10","slug":"centrist-dads-need-not-apply-to-join-paddy-cosgraves-latest-endeavour-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/290736\/","title":{"rendered":"Centrist dads need not apply to join Paddy Cosgrave\u2019s latest endeavour \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new bookshop is always a cause for celebration, so welcome to The Whistleblower, Paddy Cosgrave<\/a>\u2019s latest endeavour on Dublin\u2019s South Anne Street. The Web Summit founder promises \u201ca space where literature, caffeine and great ideas collide across five floors of reading rooms, meeting rooms, event spaces, co-working rooms, podcast studios and of course a bookshop filled with amazing books on tech, policy and sci-fi\u201d. <\/p>\n

An image posted by Cosgrave on X in November 2025 displayed a sign showing rooms with the following names: Fidel Castro Meeting Room, Vladimir Lenin Office, Clara Zetkin Meeting Room, Politburo Boardroom, Assata Shakur Office, Deng Xiaoping Reading Room, People\u2019s Hall, Zhou Enlai Reading Room, Xi Jinping Caf\u00e9, Thomas Sankara Studio and Rosa Luxembourg Studio.<\/p>\n

The sign is red, if the theme wasn\u2019t sufficiently clear from that list. It joins non-communist bookshops such as Hodges Figgis, Dubray, Eason and Ulysses Rare Books in the Grafton Street area, and long-standing communist bookshop Connolly Books in Temple Bar on the list of Dublin outlets explicitly enthusiastic about Sankara, the murdered revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso. <\/p>\n

\u201cCoffee will be free for whistleblowers and \u20ac10 for centrist dads,\u201d Cosgrave pledged separately as the space neared completion. Jobs for general managers and baristas are advertised on Web Summit\u2019s careers page. Centrist dads, we assume, should not bother to apply.<\/p>\n

Want to relive the Famine? Good news – Americans have made a board game of it<\/p>\n

January is a good time for a board game, with the evenings still dark, the temperatures low and the pubs in maintenance mode after the festive rush. So why not gather the family and break out a copy of The Great Hunger: Ireland\u2019s Tragedy in the 19th Century?<\/p>\n

Suspend your surprise as Overheard reveals that it is an American-made endeavour. It invites between two and five players to \u201crepresent families of tenant farmers and field hands\u201d, initially expanding across a Risk-style map of Ireland as the population booms on the back of the nutritious potato, which can of course feed a family on just a \u201csmall, rocky plot of land\u201d.<\/p>\n

If only the story ended there. But no, along comes a non-player character: Phytophthora infestans, a fungus-like microorganism with a habit of ruining potatoes. An dubh: blight. <\/p>\n

\"TheThe partial rulebook available on the Kickstarter page for the game <\/p>\n

Many Irish readers may remember from school or from consulting the generational trauma in their soul that this had cataclysmic consequences. The population of the island dropped from 8.2 million in 1841 to 6.6 million in 1851, due to starvation, disease and emigration, and all \u2013 from demographics to the look of the countryside to politics and culture \u2013 changed utterly<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This set of events is represented in gameplay through mechanics such as securing employment in factories or emigrating \u2013 via a six-berth boat that exists as territory on the map itself \u2013 to America. The player battles it out with their opponents to survive the disastrous events of the late 1840s. <\/p>\n

According to the rule book, the player with the closest Irish ancestry goes first, or failing that \u2013 let\u2019s say you\u2019re playing this with your family of tenant farmers in a single-room turf both\u00e1n and everyone has equally close Irish ancestry \u2013 the player with the most Irish-sounding name. It is silent on what happens if everyone has an equally Irish-sounding name, or where a Scottish Gaelic surname with a long history in Ireland such as McDonald, to choose a random example, would rank. We assume you can draw straws. <\/p>\n

The game ends as the blight abates, with victory handed to \u201cthe family with the largest surviving population across Ireland and America\u201d. Just as it happened in history. <\/p>\n

Those who wish to relive this moment can secure an early copy of The Great Hunger by pledging support<\/a> on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter to the tune of around \u20ac47 plus \u20ac49 shipping (!), roughly the retail cost of 9\u00bd sacks of potatoes. <\/p>\n

Crisis? What crisis?<\/p>\n

Politically moderate fathers of talent and ambition might, however, seek gainful employment with another tech company partly headquartered in Ireland. Airbnb<\/a>, the international short-let booking platform, is hiring something called a \u201cGlobal Crisis Management Disaster Response Coordinator\u201d.<\/p>\n

The whole world is in a terrible state of chassis, as Captain Boyle said in Se\u00e1n O\u2019Casey\u2019s Juno and the Paycock, and a company of Airbnb\u2019s size needs to be alert to any dangers. A \u201ctypical day\u201d in the job, according to the listing on the platform\u2019s website, includes the following: keeping an eye on \u201cincidents and events globally\u201d, paying particular attention to ones that might have a negative impact on Airbnb, figuring out what to do about them, organising and leading \u201clarge-scale and high priority\u201d disaster responses, being the point of contact as they unfold, and \u201cother duties as requested or assigned\u201d. <\/p>\n

In order to fulfil this somewhat daunting brief, candidates are expected to have various skills, including \u201coperating effectively during high-pressure, fast-moving events, including nights, weekends and unexpected hours as required\u201d, and also good experience in global intelligence analysis. Some travel required. Pay from \u20ac60,000 for the lucky winner. <\/p>\n

The least Irish Seamus in the world\"SeamusSeamus Blackley’s now-deleted Twitter thread about baking with ancient Egyptian yeast <\/p>\n

Overheard maintains a professional interest in all noteworthy Irish people abroad, which made us alert to the existence of Seamus Blackley. A physicist by training, his main claim to fame is inventing the Xbox, Microsoft\u2019s gaming console, an updated version of which is still widely played today.<\/p>\n

He has also, in a twist, been prominent on social media in more recent years for baking sourdough bread using revitalised yeast extracted from ancient Egyptian pottery<\/a>, a fascinating project that links us directly to the earliest bread-eating humans thousands of years ago. Smithsonian magazine once described him as a \u201cgastroegyptologist\u201d, which cannot be a common specialism.<\/p>\n

His primary characteristic for us, however, is his name. He gives no outward indication of being an Irishman abroad, and in fact is comprehensively American in affect in the videos we have carefully studied. But his name is Seamus. And we couldn\u2019t find a satisfactory reason why. So we got in touch.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am horrified to inform you that Seamus is a nickname chosen (by vote) for me at [game studio] Looking Glass when I was a young game developer,\u201d he told Overheard. His wife, \u201cthough raised in England\u201d, is a Quinn, however.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ll take it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new bookshop is always a cause for celebration, so welcome to The Whistleblower, Paddy Cosgrave\u2019s latest endeavour…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":290737,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[79,18,2215,19,17,73843],"class_list":{"0":"post-290736","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-for-you","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-paddy-cosgrave"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115915720256182944","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290736\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/290737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}