In conversation with FRANCES O'ROURKE
SEAN O'SULLIVANis the newest Dragon on RTÉ's Dragon's Den. He sold his first technology company, MapInfo, before he was 30, started a rock band, became a film-maker, then founded Avego, a technology firm with offices in Kinsale, China and the US. He is credited with inventing the term 'cloud computing'. He is from the US, and now lives in Kinsale with his wife, journalist Tish Durkin and their children.
‘IT WAS APRIL 2003 when Tish and I met in Amman, Jordan. I’d been allowed into Iraq to make a film documentary as part of a Christian Peacemakers group, and had been ejected. I was in a rush to get back and organised taxis to take us to Baghdad.
“We were supposed to leave at midnight and everyone was there except for Tish. She was in the bar having a glass of Champagne and a burger! I thought, jeez, it doesn’t sound like this is gonna be a low-maintenance girl.
“She had been captured by the Syrian authorities before making it to Amman, and didn’t have a valid press pass; she was relying on bluffing her way through all the checkpoints. The moment I thought she was really cool was when she bought three cans of spam on the Jordanian side before we passed a checkpoint. The odds of her getting through were very low; I liked the fact that she said, “Oh, just leave me, I’ll be okay by myself.” She was so courageous, independent and optimistic. I thought, this is someone very special.
“I was low profile in Iraq, mostly for safety: I would have been kidnapped if it was known I was wealthy. I didn’t know who Tish was but we kept running into people in Baghdad who’d say, ‘Wow, you’re Tish Durkin.’ Then I saw her on CNN, with Soldedad O’Brien saying, ‘Good to see you again,’ and realised she must be well-known.
“I did the film-making in Iraq for a couple of months. Between May 2003 and April 2004, the most vital thing to engage with was the reconstruction effort. So I started JumpStart International, a charity that employed Iraqis rebuilding damaged buildings and building new ones.
“A year after Tish and I met, I was going back to Los Angeles and I proposed: the civil war had just begun . . . as Tish and Mohaymen Al Safar, my friend who was to be my best man and who was later assassinated, went to the airport with me. It was absolute mayhem. I wanted her to know I’d be coming back, that I’d be there for her.
“Her father and my biological father were both at Fordham law school at the same time. After we married, we moved first to Madrid, because it was just a few hours to the mid-East. When Tish got pregnant, I decided I had to take care of my own safety. My father hadn’t been around and I didn’t want to be the guy who’d put my life at risk.
Ireland was a natural place to come, its countryside is world-class. “I’m a bit bemused by people’s reaction to my being on TV after just a few weeks. People all over the country are stopping me on the street, saying, ‘Oh, you’re that guy,’ trying out one-liners.”
TISH DURKINis a US journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, National Journal and Rolling Stone; she is currently a columnist with US magazine The Week. She lives in Kinsale with her husband, Sean and their children Charlotte (6) and Mathias (4). She is a campaigner for the rights of children such as Mathias, who has autism.
‘I LEFT MY JOB with the National Journal in Washington and went on contract to cover Iraq in 2003. A couple of days before I met Sean, two guys and I had tried to swim the Tigris, got arrested, and after a few days in Syrian custody, drove to Amman, Jordan. Some guys had organised to get a taxi to go to Baghdad . I later learnt they’d tossed a coin to see who would have to take me. Sean lost the coin toss – and that’s how we met.
“For the first few months that I knew him, I thought he was a film documentarian from California wearing unfortunate Hawaiian shirts. I always joke that we lived together from the first night we met – but then so did 38 other people, in this hotel room that had no electricity or running water, for a month. When I had my daughter a few years later, I remember thinking, I’m in the middle of childbirth and I still look better than I did when we first met.
“What attracted me was number one, he’s a super-kind person. My general impression was that Sean had initially done well at one of the computer things, but had lost it all or spent it going to film school. I did not have the impression that he was a wealthy person until I saw the balance sheet, and that’s when we were engaged.
“That was exactly one year after we met. We were still in Iraq; Sean was going to Los Angeles for the premiere of a film he’d made about his mother. I was going to go too but then I got this assignment from Rolling Stone. I joke that he proposed and then left me.
“I’m from New Jersey: our backgrounds are different, even though we’re both from large Irish-American Catholic families and our fathers are both lawyers. But his father abandoned the family and they really struggled.
“We got married in my church in New Jersey – I was so happy for my parents. They went from their worst nightmare, our daughter’s about to get kidnapped in Baghdad, to, she’s marrying an Irish Catholic! We both have dual passports, my entire background is Irish too. When Charlotte was nine months old we drove around Ireland trying to pick a place to live. We saw this house in Kinsale, just 20 minutes from the airport. We have lovely friends here.
“Charlotte is in senior infants and for now, we can afford to get Mathias, who has autism, the education he needs – but even for us, because the atmosphere here is so hostile to Applied Behavioural Analysis, a pillar of autism intervention, it’s hard to find people trained to do it. Irish Government policy on autism is a joke and costly for the Irish taxpayer: it takes all the international knowledge about autism education and says, that’s not for us, we’ll pedal along as if it’s 1950.”
