THIS WEEK’S WEB Summit will be the first to take place without co-founder Paddy Cosgrave as director and CEO.
Cosgrave formally resigned as chief executive office of Web Summit and as director of its parent company Manders Terrace Ltd this month following backlash to statements he made on Twitter accusing Israel of “war crimes” in Gaza.
The 40-year-old entrepreneur has been regarded as a controversial figure since the 2015 Web Summit event, throughout which he raised complaints about infrastructural problems in Dublin, including unsatisfactory Wi-Fi coverage, hotel costs and traffic near the RDS, where it was held. At the time, Cosgrave appeared to engage in a PR tug-of-war with the Irish government, inviting Taoiseach Enda Kenny to the event two days before it began.
The next year, Cosgrave uprooted Web Summit and relocated the annual event to the Portuguese capital of Lisbon, which is where next week’s event will also take place.
In the ensuing years, Cosgrave has become an even more vociferous critic of the Irish government, regularly broadcasting his thoughts to his 92.5k Twitter followers.
There is a sense that Cosgrave had long walked a tightrope – balancing the running of an organisation that relies on the involvement of establishment figures, political leaders and multinational corporations, while using his personal profile to advance an agenda that centred around attacking corruption in Irish public life, and what he has often referred to as “cronyism”.
Crusade against cronyism
The day before the 2020 general election, Cosgrave publicly took a political stand in which he called on the public not to vote for Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael.
In a tweet that contained language that would come to define Cosgrave’s public persona over the next few years, he said: “Voting FFG tomorrow is a vote for me & my crony pals. Under FFG, my personal tax rate & cronies like me can remain below 2%, my company’s tax rate can remain close to 0%, tax on family offices of my crony pals can remain ~0%.”
The tweet suggested a ratcheting up of Cosgrave’s stance on Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, and heralded a new era of frequent anti-government pronouncements by the erstwhile CEO. During this time Cosgrave, who was educated at the Glenstal Abbey Boarding school in Limerick – where fees are currently €21,704 annually for full-time boarding – would often use the phrase “me and my crony pals,” establishing himself as a figure who would attack Ireland’s corridors of power from the inside.
In 2021 the only people that should still be supporting FFG are cronies like me
— Paddy Cosgrave (@paddycosgrave) December 31, 2020
Unless you own/run a big company or vulture fund or property fund or use Ireland for profit shifting or similar, then FFG don't represent your interests
FFG represent my interests and my crony pals
The Wicklow man had regularly tweeted about the issue of cronyism in Ireland since 2019. He and his followers regularly used the pirate flag emoji in order to signal their participation in this loose, big tent, anti-cronyism movement.
As recently as July of this year, Cosgrave responded to a tweet by Fianna Fáil TD Niall Collins, apparently implying that the “values” and “priorities” of the party amount to “cronyism” – suggesting that his attitude towards Ireland’s ruling parties remains unchanged.
Cosgrave’s criticism of the government intensified during the Covid-19 pandemic, though on one occasion this resulted in a very public climbdown. Less than a month after Ireland’s first record case of Covid-19, Cosgrave caused consternation by tweeting the false claim that four HSE nurses had died of Covid.
The tweet was retweeted without comment more than 350 times and ‘liked’ by over 4,000 accounts on the platform, though it later transpired that Cosgrave’s source, businessman Pat Phelan, had been mistaken.
The claim was almost immediately refuted by the HSE, and three months later Cosgrave issued a public apology to both the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation as well as the HSE.
While Cosgrave got it badly wrong on this occasion, he had established himself as a critic of the Irish healthcare system who mostly dealt in the truth. As reported by The Journal, Cosgrave had also “tweeted a number of stories from sources which turned out to be true – or, at least, had kernels of truth within”.
His popularity grew significantly during this time as he continued to challenge the Irish government over its Covid respond, and his Twitter following has nearly doubled from the 55,000 he’d amassed as of March 2020.
The Ditch
In April 2021, Irish news website The Ditch was founded with financial backing from Paddy Cosgrave, via Web Summit. Upon its foundation, the website was helmed editorially by Roman Shortall, Chay Bowes and Eoghan McNeill.
The Ditch gathered steam in August 2022, following a series of greatly consequential investigations into undeclared interests by elected representatives in Ireland. In particular, the website broke several stories relating to Fianna Fáil TD Robert Troy, who had failed to disclose the ownership of several properties. The reporting eventually resulted in Troy’s resignation as Minister of State.
Troy’s fellow Minister of State Damien English, a Fine Gael TD, also resigned from his position after The Ditch reported that he’d failed to declare ownership of an existing home in his planning application for a new property in 2008.
There have been changes at the top of The Ditch since its inception, however, most notably the departure of Chay Bowes.
Bowes, a whistleblower who had provided Village Magazine with details pertaining to Leo Varadkar leaking a confidential GP contract agreement to his personal friend Dr Maitiú Ó Tuathail in 2020, stepped back from his role in The Ditch in summer 2022.
Originally a one-third shareholder in the organisation, Bowes divested his holdings at some point before annual returns were filed earlier this year.
Bowes has since become a correspondent for Russia Today, and has been invited by Russia to speak at the UN Security Council, where he condemned what he called the “ever hawkish Anglosphere” for their military support for Ukraine, which he characterised as a “seemingly perpetual escalation of military aid”.
Last night I was out with @BowesChay
— Paddy Cosgrave (@paddycosgrave) November 11, 2021
He was stopped constantly by people who wanted to shake his hand. We had a pint outside the Duke & historian @fallon_donal joined. Even there a fan stopped to heap respect on Chay
Most media say no one cares. Most media are out of touch.
Legal actions
By the time The Ditch had begun to make a stir, Cosgrave had long been embroiled in legal action involving two former cofounders of Web Summit. The messy litigation remains ongoing and mired in the discovery process, wherein each side pores over the evidence that will be presented by the other side.
The legal drama kicked off when Cosgrave sued fellow cofounder David Kelly over an alleged breach of fiduciary duties. Kelly then countersued, claiming that Cosgrave had acted in a way that disadvantaged minority shareholders. Kelly himself owns 12% of Web Summit.
This was quickly followed by another suit filed against Cosgrave, in which fellow cofounder Daire Hickey, who owns 7% of the company, made the same claim. As things stand, further motions pertaining to the suits will proceed in December of this year.
In addition to legal challenges with respect to business dealings, Cosgrave is also facing litigation over his Twitter output.
In November of last year, CEO of Roqu Group Robert Quirke also filed a suit against Cosgrave for defamation over a tweet Cosgrave had published which referred to a dispute between the HSE and Roqu Group over the sourcing of ventilators from China during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The suit has not progressed since then and Cosgrave denies the accusation, maintaining that his statements were the truth.
Resignation
Despite this legacy of contentious events, it was not until Cosgrave spoke up about the unfolding violence in Gaza that his time as leader of Web Summit came to an end.
In respect of the bombing campaign inflicted upon Gaza by Israel, Cosgrave tweeted on 13 October: “I’m shocked at the rhetoric and actions of so many western leaders and governments, with the exception in particular of Ireland’s government, who for once are doing the right thing… War crimes are war crimes even when committed by allies, and should be called out for what they are.”
Cosgrave went on to apologise for the tweet on 17 October, 10 days after the attack by Hamas which left hundreds of Israelis civilians dead and roughly 240 people kidnapped.
“I understand that what I said, the timing of what I said, and the way it has been presented has caused profound hurt to many,” he said in a statement posted to the Web Summit website.
“To anyone who was hurt by my words, I apologise deeply. What is needed at this time is compassion, and I did not convey that.” He also announced he would be taking a break from Twitter.
It is notable that by the time Cosgrave would resign, some humanitarian organisations like Amnesty International had begun to characterise some of Israel’s actions in Gaza as war crimes.
“Our research points to damning evidence of war crimes in Israel’s bombing campaign that must be urgently investigated,” said Agnes Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty on 20 October, the day before Cosgrave’s resignation.
Nevertheless, it was this tweet that led many of the world’s largest tech companies – including Meta, Google, Stripe, Amazon Web Services and YCombinator – to pull out of next week’s conference in Lisbon.
My apologyhttps://t.co/8wfXPzGKyT
— Paddy Cosgrave (@paddycosgrave) October 17, 2023
The apology was not enough to stem the haemorrhaging of participating tech giants, and four days later, Cosgrave resigned from the company he had founded and led from a lecture hall in 2009 to a global phenomenon once described by Politico as “the Olympics of tech”. He was replaced by Katherine Maher, an American who is the former CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit which serves as the hosting platform for Wikipedia.
The latest twist in the tale came on Tuesday night, when Web Summit tweeted a thread announcing that it would be cutting ties with The Ditch. The tech event giant confirmed that part-owner Adam Connon – general counsel at Web Summit – had transferred his shareholding in the Ditch Media Ltd, effectively ending the association between the two organisations – and sending a clear message that the company is reshaping itself in the absence of Cosgrave.
While no explicit connection has been made between the two events, The Ditch had publicly expressed support for Palestine by tweeting an image of a Palestinian flag on 7 October, the same day as the attack by Hamas.
The Ditch had been counting on an influx of €1,000,000 through Web Summit over the next five years, funding which will now need to be sourced elsewhere. In their announcement, the Web Submit said that its “mission is connecting people and ideas that change the world”.
“As Web Summit moves to focus on our core mission, the board has determined we will conclude our funding relationship with the Ditch.”
That same evening, The Ditch’s official Twitter account posted: “…The Ditch has, upon reflection, decided it would like to apologise to: Nobody” and called Israel a “racist, supremacist, apartheid state”. The Ditch then deleted those tweets, and have yet to issue a statement in the aftermath of Web Summit’s announcement. The Ditch has been contacted by The Journal for comment.
Cosgrave has not made a public statement since 21 October, when he resigned as CEO of Web Summit. He has been contacted by The Journal for comment.
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