Speaker Profiles

Minister Damien English

Damien English TD was appointed Minister of State with responsibility for Employment Affairs, and Retail Businesses on July 2nd, 2020. He previously served as Minister of State at the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government with special responsibility for Housing and Urban Development, from 2017 to 2020. He also served as Minister of State for Housing and Urban Renewal in May 2016.

He is a member of the Fine Gael Parliamentary Party representing the constituency of Meath West. Damien first stood for election in 1999 and was elected to Meath County Council for the Navan electoral area. In the 2002 general election, Damien was elected to the 29th Dáil as TD for the Meath constituency.  At 24 years of age, he was the youngest TD in the 29th Dáil.

John Cunningham

John Cunningham age 56, Married for 32 years, three grown up children. Originally from Co Clare now living in Co Meath.

Qualified as an Industrial engineer and worked in several industries before founding Epicom in 1999 in Navan.

Epicom now is a group of three companies, Epicom Ireland, Epicom Food and Epicom Services. We now employ 300 staff in Edgeworthstown , Dublin and Navan.

I am a member of Entrepreneurs Organisation (EO), I am the industry champion for jobs for the government’s action plan for jobs for Co Meath. I set up an EO accelerator programme in 2018 to help small companies grow and benefit from peer to peer learning. I am a founding member of the Boyne valley Food innovation district.

Over the last 9 months I have moved to working from home, I completed a Harvard course in Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies and I have started learning the concertina.

Orla Casey

Founder, innovator, educator, multitasking project manager, strategist, optimist. Orla is one of Ireland’s leading economic development agents.  Her focus on innovative problem solving and exploitation of opportunities is sought after in Ireland and the EU as a recognised specialist in the development and funding of game changing economic development projects.   In Momentum [educate + innovate], she brings almost 30 years of entrepreneurship experience to leading one of Ireland’s thought leading specialists in food, tourism, creative, cultural and craft industries and ICT.  Entrepreneurship has been a key area of strength – in one company, Orla grew sales from €60,000 to €1.2 million in less than 3 years.    Our work in Ireland and Europe also sees us develop high impact programmes for young entrepreneurs, women entrepreneurs in STEM and an award winning programme for restart/second chance entrepreneurs.

A finalist in the 2018 AIB Women in Enterprise awards,  Orla is married to Enda (with the marital name of Felle, Orla is officially a fallen woman!),  and is  Mam to busy five-year-old twins Sadie and Paddy, two dynamo characters that keep Orla on her toes.

Gary O’Meara

Gary O’Meara is the CEO of Meath Enterprise.

Gary has over 20 year’s experience managing and developing businesses across multiple sectors from manufacturing, supply chain logistics, HR / recruitment, media advertising, marketing, public relations, digital media, community & social enterprise, facilities management, event management, enterprise development. He has started, scaled and exited a number of businesses and has experience managing a wide variety of projects for commercial and non-profit organisations in Ireland, UK and the USA.

Gary is a serial volunteer who dedicates a large proportion of time to supporting local sports associations, community & business groups and entrepreneurs and would be a an active member of various local, regional & national boards, steering committee’s & working groups for same. He holds qualifications in Business Administration, Legal Studies, Management, Financial Trading, Transport & Logistics, Public Relations, Digital Media Prodution and is a qualified member of the British Professional Photographers Association.

Gary is the current Chairman of the National Association of Community Enterprise Centres (NACEC) in Ireland and a member of the the governments Advisory Group on Small Business (AGSB). He is also member of the Institute of Directors in Ireland.

Minister Helen McEntee

Helen McEntee TD is Minister for European Affairs. She was previously appointed Minister of State for Mental Health and Older People in May 2016. She was elected to Dáil Éireann in March 2013. Deputy McEntee was appointed by An Taoiseach Enda Kenny to the Oireachtas Committee on Transport and Communications. She is also a member of the Oireachtas Committee on Environment, Culture and the Gaeltacht.

Ireland is the EU’s most youthful country, with over 40% of the population aged under 30. Yet, of the Dáil’s 166 Deputies, Helen McEntee (28) and her Fine Gael colleague Simon Harris TD (28) are the only Deputies aged under 34. Helen always speaks up in  Dáil debates for her generation, whom she says ‘have borne the brunt of a recession that we did not cause’.

Helen’s legislative achievements since becoming a TD two years ago include the Pyrite Resolution Act, which provides a €10m fund for correction works on homes in the Meath-Kildare-Dublin region that are affected by pyrite. Deputy McEntee also contributed amendments to the Road Traffic Act 2014, to support younger drivers and promote road safety.

Michael Brougham

Dr Michael Brougham is the Regional Director for Enterprise Ireland in the Eastern and Midlands Region, the largest region in Ireland in population terms.

Having worked in many roles in Enterprise Ireland, Michael has particularly been involved since 2001 in designing entrepreneurial development programmes. This includes the current New Frontiers programme which helps 140 entrepreneurs annually with the development of their investible business plan. Dr Brougham has also worked in Industry both in an MNC and a start up.

A graduate of NUI Galway with a PhD in Biotech and 4 years postdoctoral experience in the University Of Florida.

Speaker to be confirmed

Details to follow….

Noel Moran

Noel’s background has always been in financial services and payments. He previously worked for AIB and PTSB in Ireland before moving to the UK to join MBNA/Bank of America, where he was implementation manager for their commercial cards. Noel subsequently spent time with most of the large banks in Britain before moving away from debit and credit cards and into prepaid cards. His first venture in prepaid was as business and IT operations director for Altair Financial Services, a company he helped set up from scratch.

Noel founded Prepaid Financial Services in 2008. It has become the third largest MasterCard issuer in Europe and also one of the leading e-money payment companies. The company provides alternative banking solutions to partners and clients in 26 different EU countries. Following on from PFS was born eCOMM Merchant Solution, located out of Navan. A provider of payment solutions to on-line merchants. eCOMM facilitates the movement of money from customers bank accounts to merchant bank account. We work directly with Visa and MasterCard and the company now employs 60+ employees from its Navan office.

David Downes

David Downes is a founding member and Director of UMAC Systems. He is responsible for the company’s operations in Ireland and the United Kingdom.

UMAC Systems offer automation, control, telemetry and SCADA software solutions to industry. The company has played a significant role in the development of the automation platform for the current phase of Irish Water Disinfection upgrades. UMAC have also been engaged to develop the automation infrastructure for Kerry Central Regional Water Supply Scheme, Burncourt and Fethard Water Supply Scheme and many other projects of local and national importance.

The company is headquartered in the Kells Tech Hub in Meath and has successfully completed projects monitoring and controlling plant and equipment in Europe, USA, Africa and Asia.

David has an engineering background and is also a qualified commercial pilot, he is originally from Dublin and has been living in Meath for 12 years.

Jass Foley

Jass Foley is a Director of Photography working in Feature Film and TV Series for Netflix, RTE, TG4 and Virgin Media/TV3. Commercial work includes brands such as SuperValu, Ryanair, Chef, Standard Life, Skoda, Lucozade Sport, Woodies, Homestore & More, Nissan, Kerry Foods and AIB. Recent short film “A White Horse” is long-listed for an Oscar at the 2021 Academy Awards.

Conor Lynch

Conor is a native of Oldcastle but spent his career working in Dublin and beyond. His first personal website was in 1999 and he is still passionate about creating digital brands and businesses. He is best known for his award-winning work in marketing and the innovative use of technology.

Conor recently exited from Connector which he founded as a personal brand. Connector was a communications and technology agency, reaching annual revenues of seven figures.  He worked closely with local and global clients like Huawei and Volkswagen. As an educator, Conor designed numerous courses and trained over 5,000 business professionals in digital marketing.

He launched Self Makers to help people like himself succeed faster by navigating the challenges and opportunities in mixing a career of employment and self-employment.

The Self Makers mission is to help people ‘be their own business’

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John McGowan

Creator. Accidental entrepreneur. Problem Solver.
I always loved math. After 15 years of teaching math around the world, I found out the part I enjoyed was generating ideas and providing solutions…but from an entrepreneurial point of view. While teaching I made an app, g(Math), that grew to over 15 million users.
I sold it to Texthelp.
It grew into EquatIO, which now has almost 3 million users.
Now I am tending to my other apps at AutomagicalApps.com and I am in the process of growing them to scale.
I am l̶a̶z̶y̶ efficient. I want to automate mundane tasks and will spend 6 hours coding a solution to something that would take me 15 minutes to do once…but if I had to do it again I could at the click of a button! I remember spending days in math class programming my TI-81 to find solutions to the quadratic formula, rather than doing the homework. It was much more fun!

Thady Kavanagh

Thady Kavanagh has worked in freelance video production for 15 years and in the past five years has focussed in creating ideas and videos for nonprofits and SMEs.

His goal is always to find what is the message that resonates with the viewer that will encourage them to engage with the video and then deliver it using creative storytelling techniques.

He has created video content for a range of national groups like Enable Ireland, Rehab Ireland, Jigsaw and RIAI. In the past two years he developed courses to train people how to create authentic simple smartphone videos to engage people online and help boost their online presence.

Research by Hubspot and Facebook has shown authentic video shot in a simple way can create trust online with the viewer and improve impact online.

John Dowling

John began his career in the food industry nearly 20 years ago, packing yogurts on the factory floor. After graduating from college in Food Science and Quality Management he went on to work in Quality Control and Assurance in a range of product categories (Cooked Meats, Ready to Eat, Confectionary, Red Meat, Fish, Dairy and Brewing) and also in the catering and food retail sectors. Companies John has worked for include, Glanbia, Teagasc, Kerry Foods, Lir Chocolates, Liffey Meats and BWG Foods.

Over the years he has gained extensive experience of maintaining standards across a vast range of products such as cooked meats, craft beer, dairy, fresh/frozen ready meals, red meat, seafood, salads, sandwiches and confectionary for customers such as Tesco, Musgraves, Marks & Spencer and Lidl.

As the Technical Manager of a meat processing plant John successfully manage a major food crisis in 2013 dealing with inspectors from Board Bia, FSAI, and Department of Agriculture. Since then he has been using his knowledge and experience to guide and mentor existing and newly established food companies to grow and develop.

BiaSolutions has been set up by John in order to offer food producers and service providers with technical support to set up and maintain Quality Management Systems and to assist them in dealing with Environmental Health registration and compliance visits from regulatory authorities.

Speaker to be confirmed

Details to follow….