Alan Sugar is back on television screens this month with a new series of The Apprentice for BBC. Meanwhile, former host of The Apprentice in the US and the world's most odious would-be politician, Donald Trump, continues to make women, babies and hairdressers weep at an alarming rate as the presidential election nears.
But what of the former host of the Irish version of The Apprentice, motor industry legend Bill Cullen? I'm happy to report he is still bouncing about the place like a rubber ball. The financial crisis might have robbed him of his fortune, but not of his ability to deliver his well-honed Penny Apples shtick and tell dodgy jokes.
Cullen, along with his long-time companion Jackie Lavin, was in Rathmines College in Dublin on Tuesday morning for a breakfast meeting to accept its alumnus award for outstanding contribution to industry.
Fight with banks
At 74 and after a gruelling and well-publicised fight with his banks, Cullen could be forgiven if he were to flip us all the bird, slink off somewhere warm and kick back to while away the days sipping tea and watching Alan Sugar on the telly.
Perhaps he can’t afford to or maybe just doesn’t fancy it. But Cullen can’t stay off the pitch.
You can’t fake energy, and the spry septuagenarian seems genuinely to pump himself up once he launches into his oft-told story about growing up in the Dublin tenements and working his way to the top.
The recession is long-since over, and the State is back in the grip of a new, but less smug, boom. The wreckage of the last crash, meanwhile, has been sifted through and picked over by a cacophony of vultures of every shape and hue. But unless you were personally affected by business insolvency, it is easy to forget that the multitude of business failures of the last crash left in their wake a large number of previously prominent people who lost almost everything.
What must it feel like, years afterwards, to be one of those who pretty much lost it all while the rest of the State has moved on?
Bloody-mindedness as virtue
The occasional reappearance of flawed, but still thoroughly decent, characters such as Cullen should serve as reminders that resilience and sheer bloody-mindedness are virtues that ought to be valued more in this State.
His company’s creditors lost out, but so, too, did Cullen. He was a television star with the profile and status to match. His Glencullen motor group was turning over €300 million at the height of the boom. He co-owned the swish Muckross Park hotel in Kerry and had the vast property portfolio expected of successful people in those times. It’s all gone.
Lavin, a successful businesswoman in her own right, has also lost much since things went financially awry for herself and Cullen. She has joined Cullen in the septuagenarian club, turning 70 last month. A nice age to put your feet up.
Yet both she and Cullen have dusted themselves off and are trying to forge a new, more modest path in business with Bill Cullen Premier Cars, a no-frills SsangYong dealership on the Naas Road.
I don’t know many couples who would have the courage to do similar, given the circumstances.
Characteristic quips
Listening to Cullen give a speech as he accepted his award in Rathmines, it sounded just like the old days. At times, the very old days: he made a humorous but borderline quip about Muhammad Ali that would infuriate today's PC brigade. And when a woman in the audience asked him whether women could "have it all" at home and in work, he responded that, sure, didn't his mother have it all 60 years ago when "she went to work carrying a baby on each tit".
But at least Cullen was there, and in fighting spirit, and not hiding under his duvet simpering about what might have been.
Just one complaint: he made no mention, not even a passing reference, to his very public travails with the receivers and the banks, such as the €8 million judgment obtained by Danske. Those chapters, and his ability to bounce back, are as valuable and interesting a part of the Bill Cullen story as any of his folksy anecdotes about tenement life.
Footnote
What a bewildering statement on media ownership issued in the name of Denis O'Brien this week, in response to a Sinn Féin-commissioned report on media plurality. The pointed missive, distributed by his long-time spokesman James Morrissey, was 866 words – Ulyssesian for a billionaire who rarely says much to the Irish media companies he doesn't own.
But what did it all mean, exactly?
It wasn’t immediately discernible, but O’Brien’s central point appeared to be that everybody else is wrong about his huge influence over the Irish media. Which means he must be right?
He tried to deflect attention on to RTÉ, pointing out that there should be more focus on the broadcaster due to its position as the largest media entity in the State. This misses the point when it comes to media plurality: RTÉ is not one man, with one set of priorities and a multitude of other business interests, the close scrutiny of whom is firmly in the public interest .
It is correct and proper that O'Brien is subjected to more scrutiny than any other business person in Ireland, given the level of financial power and influence he can wield, even over the State. He is suing the Oireachtas in relation to legal privilege afforded to elected politicians, let's not forget.
He then suggests that Irish journalists are not “objective” when they write about him because they are trying to “undermine” him as a media competitor because the industry’s landscape is “bleak”.
And it may get bleaker, which makes diversity of opinion all the more important.
