Peter O'Dwyer

easy to a degree after doing COVID and the HSE you know like this is a sick ale of emergency yeah like this is a big institution that's really important to everything we talk about all the time and it had really big problems so it's not to downplay it but it must when you've done the HSE during COVID everything else must seem very manageable indeed well listen as I said thank you very much for joining us here this week on the business world podcast with our guest Paul Reid but until next week from me Danny McConnell and me Peter O'Doar it's bye bye for now

Okay, you're still keeping track.

That's good.

It's like a young child.

At what stage do you stop counting it in weeks and months?

Yes, you say that he probably has quite demanding stakeholders at the moment, but I suspect it may be somewhat easier than the... A little bit more benign than what he had before, yeah.

As he touches upon, especially his early years, which was really interesting to hear, actually, his early years in the role here in Ireland.

Yeah.

Like, first of all, as an ambassador with a new posting, you're obviously having to get up to speed with the country itself, but his role was probably more challenging than...

you know, really any of his predecessors for many a year, given the backdrop of the government that was in Britain at the time.

So it's great to get his perspective on all of that and how it kind of changed a little bit over time.

And whilst he was delivering unpalatable messages a lot of the time, some of them started to get through.

And he talks about with whom in government here and what specific messages.

He touches upon it as well, that almost on a purely human level, yes, he has some of these relationships already from his time, but people just kind of want to shoot the breeze about British politics.

So you're probably more inclined to take a meeting with him

so that you can have a bit of a chat about something that people in government here are interested in.

And then you get down to the business of the universities as well.

But I think that just plays into his favour as well.

Yeah, people are here to detail, but it's a bit of the Lord give it and the Lord take it away.

On the one hand, you don't have the nice car and the chauffeur anymore, but on the other hand, your life is your own a little bit more.