Media Interview – Eamonn Blaneys Website

Web designer refuses to cringe in the face of adversity – Irish Times

December 6, 2010 eblaney

IT WOULD be a shame to waste a strong iconoclastic streak, wouldn’t it? Eamonn Blaney uses his to excellent effect; badgering, doorstepping, blathering full belt to whoever will listen to get where he needs to go with his new venture – Cringefactor.com.

A few years ago the Howth native left, rather than waiting to get pushed from, his €110,000 a year job. He decided to upskill and headed into Trinity College Dublin to do a masters in business administration. Blaney spent €25,000 of his own funds, got his masters degree and re-entered a working world of . . . very little – no head honcho job, few prospects of one and faltering hope in a radically different work environment to the one he had previously inhabited. [Read More]

Scottish ‘Sunday Herald’ – 03-Oct -2010

October 4, 2010 eblaney

In the Celtic Tiger era, Eamonn Blaney would have been the embodiment of Cool Hibernia.
With his dark-rimmed designer specs and sharp pin-striped jackets, you might still mistake him for a successful entrepreneur or corporate executive if you were to see him sipping an espresso in one of the cafés near his home in Howth, a traditionally prosperous peninsula jutting out from Dublin. But the truth is this 46-year-old Dubliner is carefully counting the cost of every small indulgence these days.

Blaney is on the dole: one of the 455,000 citizens of the Irish Republic unemployed or under-employed. When he signs on, he is surrounded by traumatised Tiger Cubs, a hedonistic young generation foolishly reared to believe that their wise elders had somehow suddenly discovered a magical cure for the centuries-old scourges of economic misery and mass emigration. Blaney’s own grand misfortune was to graduate with an MBA from Ireland’s top-rated university, Trinity College Dublin, in 2008 just as the international banking crisis erupted and the southern Irish property bubble spectacularly burst. The two start-up businesses he has founded since have both failed to pay the bills as Dublin has become trapped in a particularly fearsome downward financial spiral. [Read More]