Ian Kehoe
Ian Kehoe is the co-founder, co-owner and editor-in-chief of The Currency.
Originally from Enniscorthy in Co. Wexford, Ian Kehoe studied journalism at Dublin City University between 1999 and 2003 followed immediately by a Masters in International Relations at the same university. He worked as a reporter and presenter on RTE’s flagship current affairs television programme “Prime Time: between 2010 and 2012. He moved to work as a business journalist at the Sunday Business Post before being appointed editor of the paper at the age of just 34 in 2014. Kehoe was generally regarded as having performed well as editor: although sales fell from approximately 33,000 to around 29,000 during his tenure, this was a markedly slower decline than experienced by most other Irish Sunday papers. He remained at the Business Post (where he also sat on the board of the paper’s holding company Sunrise Media as an executive director) until 2018 when he left to establish the Currency. It subsequently emerged that when Business Post owners, Key Capital, put out feelers regarding the sale of the paper in 2017/18, Kehoe and Currency co-founder Tom Lyons contemplated a management buyout but were apparently unable to find a way to make the numbers work. (Key Capital subsequently sold the paper to Kilcullen Capital’s Enda O’Coineen instead.)
In 2019 then Communicorp owner Denis O’Brien sued Post Publications for defamation in a 2015 Business Post article. As the editor who oversaw the publication of the article (by Tom Lyons) Kehoe was called to testify in the court proceedings. In his testimony Kehoe strongly defended the decision to name Mr O’Brien as one of 22 borrowers with significant loans from Irish bands referred to in a 2008 report commissioned by the Irish government from PriceWaterhouseCoopers. O’Brien ultimately lost the defamation action.
Ian Kehoe has been a member of the board of RTE since 2018 where he was a member of the board’s Audit and Risk committee. This is normally a fairly low profile position although an article in the Sunday Independent in February, based on the minutes from a November 2022 RTE board meeting, suggest that Kehoe has expressed doubts about the broadcaster’s capacity to accurately project its own income. Furthermore, as a member of the RTE board, Kehoe had to effectively step back from The Currency’s coverage of RTE during the summer of 2023 when controversy over undisclosed payments to a leading presenter made RTE itself a lead news story.
