Late last year, Web Summit chief executive Paddy Cosgrave teased his followers with details of a new business venture on the social media platform X.
The post read: “The Whistleblower bookshop and cafe is nearing completion. Coffee will be free for whistleblowers and €10 for centrist dads.”
Fast-forward a number of months and The Whistleblower cafe and bookshop is operating from its Georgian premises on 30 South Anne Street, Dublin 2.
Coffee is priced at a reasonable €3 and tote-bags cost €8, while many of the extensive selection of non-fiction and fiction political philosophy books sit at around the €15 mark. The premises is open from 11am to 5pm daily.
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There’s also a podcast studio, rooms for hosting events and workshops, as well as offices.
Inside, the walls are dark green, and bright red acts as an accent colour, with doors and skirting boards painted in the same vivid crimson. The interiors are every bit as tongue-in-cheek as Cosgrave’s original social media post.
There are striking posters with quotes from Chinese socialist thinkers and politicians hanging in rooms with titles such as the Politburo Boardroom and the People’s Hall.
Other rooms are named after China’s current leader Xi Jinping and Zhou Enlai, first premier of the People’s Republic of China, as well as Deng Xiaoping, leader from 1978 to 1989. Deng pioneered the Reform and Opening-up era in China, and was leader during the implementation of the controversial one-child policy and the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests.
Speaking on the design, bookshop manager Art O’Connor says: “I think it would be a mistake to assume a kind of unqualified endorsement of everything associated with the symbolism of some of the design elements of the shop.
“There’s Soviet constructivism, there’s CCP poster art, and yeah, it is intended to provoke people, but not to idly provoke them.
“It’s not supposed to shock or annoy anyone, it’s supposed to get people to start thinking critically about our own democracy, where power resides, how our kind of media institutions operate, the wealth inequality.”
The rooms are named after “major thinkers and revolutionaries”, says the bookshop manager and writer.
Among them are Cuban leader Fidel Castro; 19th century communist and women’s rights activist Clara Zetkin; Marxist and Pan-Africanist revolutionary Thomas Sankara, who ruled Burkina Faso until his assassination in 1987; and Black Panther Assata Shakur, whose life served as inspiration for the Oscar-winning film One Battle After Another.
Shortly before opening in May, The Whistleblower was visited by the Chinese ambassador to Ireland, Zhao Xiyuan, who Cosgrave described as the cafe’s “first government official” in a post on X. The ambassador was pictured with O’Connor.
According to the manager, the naming convention throughout the premises is “intended to be provocative”. Although all those name-checked might all be in the broadly “leftist tradition”, it is unlikely that all the figures would be in agreement.
When it comes to the room names, O’Connor also says “there is no ideological uniformity across the board” and that “there has been no kind of adverse reaction or response so far”.
He stresses that the naming of rooms after various political thinkers is not an uncritical celebration of these figures.
“It’s not intended as an unqualified endorsement of any one figure, but it is trying to get people to think. It also represents something other than the kind of hegemonic US imperialist system that we’re all sort of looking at in disgust and sort of shocked awe at the moment.”
When describing The Whistleblower, he says: “It’s a bookshop and event space that engages with a leftist political tradition. It’s here to sustain forms of intellectual and social life, not to maximise financial returns in this space in the centre of Dublin.”
Neither is it a non-profit or charity, he adds.
“It is ultimately a commercial space but nobody ever founded an independent bookshop under any kind of crass commercial impulse, because it would be really stupid. It’s not a good way to make money. The margins are tiny. It takes years to break even, even if you’re really good.
“It’s not meant to be non-profit. Potentially, it could be a very successful and profitable bookshop,” says O’Connor, who has experience working in famous bookshops such as Shakespeare and Company in Paris and Atlantis Books in Oia, Santorini, Greece.
The Whistleblower may not be a profitable venture just yet but Cosgrave, the founder of the bookshop, and now returned chief executive of Web Summit, saw profits and revenues surge at that company in 2024 after reprising his role there.
The businessman had stepped back from Web Summit in October 2023 after backlash to his posts on social media about the Israel-Hamas conflict. Several big multinational companies pulled out of the annual event.
Consolidated accounts published in late 2025 for the group behind Web Summit and its sister brands, including Collision and the Rise tech conference in Hong Kong, revealed it bounced back to an after-tax profit of €3.7 million in 2024 from a €6.7 million loss in 2023.
“I am Art O’Connor, not Paddy Cosgrave, so I know he owns The Whistleblower. So he clearly was interested in creating a space that would house that kind of discourse, but is that philanthropic, is that what you would call it? I’m not sure if that’s the word for it,” O’Connor says.
The first time O’Connor says he encountered Cosgrave was when he was being interviewed to be bookshop manager. When asked where does business and art intersect for The Whistleblower, O’Connor says: “You mean like where Paddy’s money comes from to fund this? I don’t know.
“I know next to nothing about Web Summit. I moved back from Greece to take this job. I have lived outside of Ireland for most of the last 20 years, in Berlin and Paris, Athens and Santorini and Canada for a while. So it wasn’t on my radar to be honest.
“Paddy owns it, but I manage it. He doesn’t have any curatorial input. I ask his advice about events and stuff sometimes, because he has like colossal experience in that area, but no, there’s no input really from him.”
Paddy Cosgrave was contacted by The Irish Times for comment but was told he was unavailable.
Political news website The Ditch, which was also founded by Cosgrave along with Eoghan McNeill, Roman Shortall and Chay Bowes in April 2021, was an early supporter of the bookshop, although O’Connor says that The Whistleblower is “not legally partnered in any way” with The Ditch.
“Obviously they are really helping us and they have a big following. So we’ve done a bunch of events with them.”
One such recent event, on June 9th, included a live podcast hosted by the outlet titled “The Ditch Live at The Whistleblower: Away from the mainstream, towards an alternative media”. The event’s line-up included journalist Aoife Moore, political geographer Rory Rowan, activist Jenny Maguire and economist Oisín Gilmore.
“Part of the appeal for some of the people doing events is that The Ditch is involved, especially sort of investigative journalists that we have invited, they admire what The Ditch is doing, but no, we’re separate entities,” says O’Connor.
O’Connor believes the shop will attract people with a diverse range of political opinions, especially as debate can take place there in-person as opposed to over the internet.
“A lot of digital or a lot of online political discourse involves just like the exchange of angry little anechoic, pre-digested, frequently now AI-assisted, vaguely intersecting monologues from behind screens, where people don’t really engage with each other,” says O’Connor.
He says that the location, just a stone’s throw from Grafton Street, “is such a gift” and will help The Whistleblower cast its net as wide as possible regarding the clientele who will frequent the bookshop and attend events there.
“Our location is just amazing. It kind of inclines against the echo chamber thing that you sometimes get with the leftist bookshop, because so many people come in here who aren’t looking for this. They haven’t had to go out of their way to find it, so we had quite a diverse group of people at the last event and people who definitely wouldn’t all be politically compatible with each other, and that’s nice to see, like it can be a space of debate as well.”
