Events at this location

The Association’s Western Chapter is delighted to invite you to an evening with Pat McDonagh at the University of Galway – J.E Cairnes School of Business & Economics on Thursday, 26 February from 6.30pm. The format of the event will be a fireside chat.

Pat McDonagh is the Managing Director of Ireland’s most successful indigenous quick service family restaurant group, Supermac’s. With over 118 restaurants throughout the country, Supermac’s has gone from strength to strength with a turnover well in excess of 82 million and over 2700 employees. As well as being the owners of the iconic Supermac’s, Pat & his wife, Una, are also the owners of the Plaza Group of motorway service stations that includes the Barack Obama Plaza and the Portlaoise Plaza. Pat and Una own the Só Hotel Group that includes the Castletroy Park Hotel and Castle Oaks Hotel in Limerick, the Loughrea Hotel & Spa, the Charleville Park Hotel in Cork, the Killeshin Hotel in Portlaoise and the Athlone Springs Hotel.  Each hotel is an award winner with the LoughRea Hotel and Spa recently having been selected as the best wedding hotel in Ireland while the CastleTroy Park was selected by couples as the best wedding hotel in Munster.

Pat believes that a strong community is built on being actively involved in sport and community and he was awarded the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for Industry. Both Pat and Una were honoured with an outstanding contribution award by the Irish Sponsorship Association for their commitment to sponsorship over the past 45 years.

The Association’s Western Chapter is delighted to invite Bob Goodson to present a webinar on Wednesday, 22 April from 6.30pm. Bob is the author of the Harvard Business Review book  Like: The Button That Changed the World, a riveting, insider’s look at the creation and evolution of the like button and what it reveals about innovation, business, and culture—and its profound impact on modern human interaction.

Over 160 billion times a day, someone taps a like button. How could something that came out of nowhere become so ubiquitous—and even so addictive? How did this seemingly ordinary social media icon go from such a small and unassuming invention to something so intuitive and universally understood that it has scaled well beyond its original intent? This is the story of the like button and how it changed our lives. In Like, bestselling author and renowned strategy expert Martin Reeves and coauthor Bob Goodson — Silicon Valley veteran and one of the originators of the like button — take readers on a quest to uncover the origins of the thumbs-up gesture, how it became an icon on social media, and what’s behind its power.

Registration details to follow