Theme: Beyond (Your) Fear

Together with our speakers from diverse disciplines such as Arts, Psychology and Business, we want to foster learning, inspiration and wonder – and provoke conversations that matter. To give our audience new insights in what lies beyond this powerful emotion, we will present untold stories around ideas that are on the cutting edge of their field.

Griffith College Dublin
8 S Circular Rd, Merchants Quay
Dublin, Dublin, Dublin 8
Ireland

Ellen Keane

Growing up with only one arm certainly made life more challenging, but that didn’t stop Ellen. She learned to cope with her insecurities in the swimming pool, where there was no place to hide. In 2008, she was the youngest Irish athlete to participate in the Paralympic Games – and in 2016, she secured a bronze medal at the Rio de Janeiro Paralympics.

Karl O'Connor

Karl O’Connor has seen some amazing things in his workspace. As the creative director of The Nightmare Realm, THE scare house in Ireland, Karl O’Connor knows how to crawl inside people’s heads, play around a little and leave them wondering how he did it. He can offer a unique perspective on fear as entertainment. Why do people actually pay to be afraid?

Mia Christina Döring

Mia Christina Döring is a psychotherapist on a mission. With her story of rape and the fear of speaking out, she talks about how the personal can be political – and how we need to think differently to really make a change happen.

Oisín Scollard

Oisín Scollard learned to turn a terrible event in his life into something that altered the course of not only his only life, but of thousands of other people. Access to mental health is often constrained by a fear of actually asking for help. His online mental health counselling platform turn2me.org lowers the barrier of the first step substantially. It received wide criticism in the beginning from non-believers. Today, it is supporting over 40.000 people per month.

Paul Devaney

After working for 12 years for the Rolls-Royce Aerospace Group, Paul Devaney felt the call for adventure and started the Seven Summit challenge – to climb the highest peaks of all continents. In 2014 and 2015 the incredible happened: He got incredibly lucky to survive the two most deadly seasons in the history of Mount Everest, witnessing the horror of two deadly avalanches. Paul wants to talk about the incredible, yet human, reaction to fear of the known and the unknown, and how people worked through and beyond it to achieve amazing acts of defiance and kindness.

Paul Hayes

Paul Hayes sees more value in learning from failure than marvelling at the success of others, and this is where he came up with the idea for ‘flounders’. Flounders is a mock/rival of the F.ounders event at the Web Summit that offered a save space for stories of failure. Paul Hayes talks about Start-Up Wakes, a concept that takes that idea to the next level: It’s a great craic where dead Start-ups are officially “buried”, to offer a moment of real catharsis. The idea has seen tremendous interest from all over the world – the Web Summit conference, London, Texas and Berlin.

Rob Lipsett

Rob Lipsett found his passion for fitness through rugby. Starting out at 12 years, he soon realized as he got older how he preferred the actual training and pushing his own boundaries over playing rugby. After becoming a personal trainer, more and more people kept asking him for advice, until he set up a YouTube channel. Less than a year later, Rob had become the biggest fitness YouTuber in Ireland. Today, he is the get-go person for over 250k followers on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube who follow his fitness advice. Rob shares his story of pushing himself through his own fear and pain and society’s expectations to now be at the top of what he does.