Michael Dwyer

Have you ever: -wondered how time travellers manage without their assistants.-wondered how anyone could be so careless as to lose his shadow.-wanted to follow a cat to a concert in a thunderstorm.-wondered if Gran really did have second sight.-pondered if there's a secret ingredient in coffee.-wondered whether messing with the truth messes with your Karma-wondered how many aliens are living among us?-wished you had your own fairy at the bottom of the garden.-thought aliens might have coloured spaceships.-wondered if you'd been given a particularly bossy guardian angel.-wanted to be transformed into an eagle but...-wondered if books talk to each other on the shelves when no one is there.-been lost between the covers of a book, and found a different world between its pages.

Told through his journals, from the arena recounts Michael Dwyer's marathon entrepreneurial journey with Pigsback.com, starting at the height of the dot-com boom in late 1999, going on to pursue international ambitions in Britain and North America, facing a myriad of unforeseen shocks along the way. The journals tell the entrepreneur's business and personal highs and lows, persisting on a wing and a prayer, reinventing time and again until that final chance - an encore - one last shot at success. Buckle up and enjoy the ride. A tale of the thrills and spills of a 20-year "overnight success story" ... Dwyer's vision, resourcefulness and stamina are inspiring. Gareth Lambe, former VP, Meta A rare insight into the mind of the entrepreneur as they confront the myriad of unforeseen challenges that are part and parcel of a business journey ... a book brimming with insights and lessons for business students and aspiring entrepreneurs. Joanne Lynch, Assistant Professor Marketing, Dublin City University Business School An inspiring illustration of what it takes to get through the darkness when things go wrong ... and in startups, things always go wrong. Brian O'Mahony, Entrepreneur (co-founder of Bounce Marketing and Tribe Charity) and Start-Up Business Advisor A must-read for any budding entrepreneur, marketer or business person. I felt like I got to know and love the team, collectively and individually John Rooney, Managing Director, Flogas A white-knuckle ride laced with optimism, despair and triumph. An enthralling read. A rollercoaster, if ever there was one Noel Hayes, Business Lecturer.

Winner of the 2019 NUI Publication Prize in Irish History. This book is the first comprehensive history of the anti-diphtheria campaign and the factors which facilitated or hindered the rollout of the national childhood immunization programme in Ireland. It is easy to forget the context in which Irish society opted to embrace mass childhood immunization. Dwyer shows us how we got where we are. He restores Diphtheria’s reputation as one of the most prolific child-killers of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland and explores the factors which allowed the disease to take a heavy toll on child health and life-expectancy. Public health officials in the fledgling Irish Free State set the eradication of diphtheria among their first national goals, and eschewing the reticence of their British counterparts, adopted anti-diphtheria immunization as their weapon of choice. An unofficial alliance between Irish medical officers and the British pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome placed Ireland on the European frontline of the bacteriological revolution, however, Wellcome sponsored vaccine trials in Ireland side-lined the human rights of Ireland’s most vulnerable citizens: institutional children in state care. An immunization accident in County Waterford, and the death of a young girl, raised serious questions regarding the safety of the immunization process itself, resulting in a landmark High Court case and the Irish Medical Union’s twelve-year long withdrawal of immunization services. As childhood immunization is increasingly considered a lifestyle choice, rather than a lifesaving intervention, this book brings historical context to bear on current debate.

The texts gathered in this volume embrace women artists-only exhibitions, festivals, collective art projects, groups and associations, organised in the long 1970s in Europe (1968-1984). These all-women art initiatives are closely related to developments within the political and politicized women's movement in Europe and America but what emerges is the varied and plural manner of their engagements with feminism(s) alongside their creation of `heterotopias' in relation to specific sites/ politics/ collaborative art practices. This book presents examples from Italy, Spain, UK, Portugal, Austria, Poland, Denmark, Germany (East and West), The Netherlands, France and Sweden. While each chapter is largely devoted to one country, the authors point to how the local and specific political situation in which these initiatives emerged is linked to global tendencies as well as inter-European exchanges. Each chapter of this book thus assesses the impact of travelling views of feminism, by considering connections made between women artists (often when travelling abroad) or their knowledge of art practices from abroad. Distinct and highly varied attitudes towards political activism (from strong engagement to a clearly pronounced distance and even hostility) are shown in each essay and, what is more, they are shown as based on radically different premises about feminism, politics and art.

Winner of the 2019 NUI Publication Prize in Irish History. This book is the first comprehensive history of the anti-diphtheria campaign and the factors which facilitated or hindered the rollout of the national childhood immunization programme in Ireland. It is easy to forget the context in which Irish society opted to embrace mass childhood immunization. Dwyer shows us how we got where we are. He restores Diphtheria’s reputation as one of the most prolific child-killers of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland and explores the factors which allowed the disease to take a heavy toll on child health and life-expectancy. Public health officials in the fledgling Irish Free State set the eradication of diphtheria among their first national goals, and eschewing the reticence of their British counterparts, adopted anti-diphtheria immunization as their weapon of choice. An unofficial alliance between Irish medical officers and the British pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome placed Ireland on the European frontline of the bacteriological revolution, however, Wellcome sponsored vaccine trials in Ireland side-lined the human rights of Ireland’s most vulnerable citizens: institutional children in state care. An immunization accident in County Waterford, and the death of a young girl, raised serious questions regarding the safety of the immunization process itself, resulting in a landmark High Court case and the Irish Medical Union’s twelve-year long withdrawal of immunization services. As childhood immunization is increasingly considered a lifestyle choice, rather than a lifesaving intervention, this book brings historical context to bear on current debate.