Tom Lyons

Tom Lyons is the co-founder, co-owner and Chief Executive of The Currency. 

Tom Lyons went to Terenure College, the fee-paying Catholic secondary school from 1990 util 1996. He studied Economics and History at Trinity College Dublin from 1998 - 2001 before completing a Masters in Journalism at Dublin City University in 2001/2. He has been a business journalist since 2002, commencing his full time employment with the Irish Independent. He moved to Newstalk 106 radio in 2006 before taking on a sequence of senior editorial roles with the Sunday Times (2007 - 2011), the Sunday Independent (2012 - 2013), the Irish Times (2013 - 15) and the Sunday Business Post (2015 - 19). He has been awarded Business Journalist of the Year on three occasions - 2011, 2016 and 2018 - at the National Newspaper of Ireland/Newsbrands annual awards. 

In 2019 then Communicorp owner Denis O’Brien sued Post Publications for defamation in a 2015 Business Post article. As the author of the article in question Lyons 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.

This was not the first time the journalist had earned the ire of Denis O’Brien. In April 2012, Lyons had approached Mr O’Brien in the context of an article he was writing for the Sunday Independent about loans from Anglo-Irish Bank to Mr O’Brien. O’Brien, who was then the single largest shareholder in the Sunday Independent’s owner, had refused to comment. However, a spokesman for Mr O’Brien, James Morrissey subsequently emailed the Business Editor of the Sunday Independent in the context of the article describing Mr Lyons as “unprofessional and his conduct as unacceptable”.