It is good to know who the faces are behind the ever growing asylum seeker accommodation sector in Ireland, I think, particularly given the relative lack of interest in the area amongst Ireland’s mainstream media outlets.
It seems to have been left to Gript to do so, in the same way that RTÉ and the mainstream media feel that it is part of their duty to provide the full details of those charged – and not yet convicted, remember – for incidents that allegedly took place at the Townbe accommodation centre.
One thing is for certain, you are highly unlikely to see the same media publishing photographs, names and addresses of the persons arrested yesterday as part of yet another Interpol-led operation against foreign crime gangs such as the Black Axe gang based in the state.
When not helping diversify the lives of the people of pale unhip uncool Coolock, Townbe Unlimited’s Peter McGarry is doing his best to save the planet.
An eagle-eyed reader recalled that McGarry had used up part of one of his, presumably tax free, days in the Old Country in 2022 to return to his old stomping ground to dispense wampum on the children if they promised to do good things for the planet.
McGarry, whose illustrious entrepreneurial career began in March 2006 when appointed as director to the family business Caragh Trees, chose Naas CBS as the site to launch the Earth Prize, the winners of which would be the beneficiaries of his, the missus Melanie’s and other wealthy planet-saving global financial wizards’ largesse.
The Irish Independent report on all of this by Katherine Donnelly segues into a wonderfully sub Brontean first person narrative which brings you into the soul of Peter as he wondered what all the “commotion” outside was as he sat in his office one lazy afternoon.
Wasn’t it only thousands of kids “taking over the streets and expressing their frustrations and passions about environmental sustainability.” In fairness, rather than calling the Commugny Schweizer Polizei Public Order Unit and having the rapscallions beaten and pepper sprayed off the road, Peter decided to give a few of his pals a bell and thus was born the Earth Foundation and the Earth Prize.
The idea, according to themselves at least, appears to have grown wings and they claim to have lots of people taking part, although their graphic designer has provided little clue to levels of participation, to my untutored eye at least.
One of the 516 teams that took part in 2021 included a school in Vietnam which invented a biodegradable sanitary pad made from the peel of the dragon fruit. I suppose it is as well to be prepared for all contingencies once the Masters of the Universe have taken their vig.
Details on the Earth Foundation are pretty sparse. Its Linkedin page merely tells us that it was founded in 2020, is based in Geneva and employs between 2 and 10 people, which seems pretty bad head counting to me, but what would I know. Maybe some of them are off measuring icebergs or counting penguins and snails someplace.
We do know that its CEO until June was Angela McCarthy. In a statement on her Linkedin page posted a few weeks ago she recalled how in 2019 McGarry, a “hedge fund manager,” had approached her with his “visionary idea.” McCarthy was brought up in Switzerland and attended Aiglon College.
Aiglon is one of the most expensive boarding schools in the world, the top six of which are all based in Switzerland and are the alma mater of the children of some of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet. So it is nice to see these people giving something back to that planet, although I bet they themselves have no plans to start making gender neutral sanitary pads out of leftover fruit.
Having left Aiglon, McCarthy worked for nine years with Black Pearl Capital, and prior to that with Merrill Lynch in Geneva. Black Pearl manage the investments of Reza Irani-Kermani and Abbas Jafarian. Black Pearl, one of the largest property investors in Europe, describes itself as “specialising in opportunistic private and public equity investments across various industry sectors.”
Does that not just sound familiar? Black Pearl too bung a few bob towards charities. Among their beneficiaries have been Oxfam which of course is all on board too with the “free movement of capital and labour” so dear to the hearts of the corporate giants.