UCD Business Impact

Donal O’Donovan, Business Editor at the Irish Independent and Chair of the Business Journalists Association of Ireland, and Kathleen Gallagher, journalist with the Business Post and winner of the Women in Business Journalism Award Category at the 2025 UCD Smurfit School Business Journalist Awards, look back over the stories that hit the headlines. 

UCD BComm alumna Siobhán Talbot is one of Ireland's most accomplished and widely respected business leaders. Join us as she discusses her remarkable career journey, which she describes as a "baptism of fire" from the hard graft of PwC to her rise to Group Managing Director of Glanbia. Siobhán shares how the massive risk of strategically pivoting Glanbia away from purely food production into global nutrition, supplements and health paid off. She discusses her passion for company culture, the relentless pace of change and what it truly takes to “earn the right to grow” in today’s dynamic global market.

UCD BComm alumna, Fiona Carney, explores one of the biggest transformations reshaping the world of work, AI. A leader at Microsoft, she draws on her expertise to explain how AI is enhancing productivity, enabling higher-value work, accelerating innovation, and transforming how companies engage with customers. But, she explains how technology alone isn’t enough; people, skills, and change management matter more than ever.

Aviation could account for up to 20% of global carbon emissions by 2050, but as Professor Tom Conlon explains, the real barrier to change isn’t technology, it’s finance. He believes that if the sector is to grow, it has to decarbonise, but to do so, bold investor actions are required. Tom’s recent research, featured in Science, one of the world’s leading academic journals, explores how new financial models can drive deep decarbonisation in aviation.

Dr Emmet Oliver, Lecturer at UCD College of Business, takes a deep dive into the pivotal decades that shaped modern Ireland, drawing on insights from his new book, Irish Nation Building: Government, Business and Power, 1922–1958.