CenterPieceNY with Paul Finnegan

Linda Bonnar is a successful life coach and entrepreneur. She's also a former educator, and has built her services around both her experiences in the teaching profession, and her teenager years with mental health struggles in her hometown of Ballinasloe in County Galway in Ireland. During those fragile, formative years of her childhood she had the misfortune of being targeted by a clique of mean-spirited schoolgirls, which made her road to today all the more difficult.But she has ...

Jennifer Muldowney, from Dublin’s fair city, in Ireland, is an author, a podcaster, and a member of that exclusive set of people who has given a TED Talk.But for this vivacious young woman, all these glamorous activities are in support of her unique, creative, small-ish, and growing business, which, not to put too fine a point on it, services the industry of passing and death. Jennifer's work is as much a service to the living survivors, as it is to the departed. If you don’t know Jenni...

When it comes to experiences, life is an embarrassment of riches. Even more so, if you're an adventurous, wandering type, which might be another way of saying 'if you're Irish'.Certainly Denis Maguire is, although he has gone about it in his own quiet way. As a thoughtful playwright, flimmaker and artist, boisterousness is not for him. Raised in Galway City in Ireland, of rebel lineage, and later a college student in Dublin, he left his native Ireland and headed off to stud...

Corina Galvin calls County Mayo in Ireland her home. She's also been a New Yorker for almost three decades. And she has accumulated a lot of frequent flyer miles along the way. That's because her job in event planning and management puts her constantly up in the air, traveling all over the globe, meeting some significant influencers in the process. This job, the only career of her working life, also allows her to divide her down time nicely between Ireland and New Yor...

Jane McCooey thrives when she’s bringing people together to solve a problem, to the benefit of all.When Jane, from County Armagh in Ireland, is confronted with obstacles, she’s not afraid to reach out for help, and her first port of call is often to tap into the familiar power of sisterhood. Before you know it, she’s fallen in with a band of sisters. She’s done this repeatedly–sports being a prime example–and more recently in the world of work.Why there, you ask?Because, yo...

Niall O'Leary is best known as a performer of Irish dance in the New York area, and further afield. A lesser known fact about Niall is that he also has his own Manhattan-based architecture practice.The amazing thing about Niall is how he has managed to satisfy his innate need to create and design in these two very disparate disciplines. To him there is barely a difference between them. Maybe every young person should be trained to think like Niall, so when they are asked what they...