Profile: Norah Casey

Unlike her predecessor Newman, Casey has made an immediate impact on the show, sparking off her co-dragons like a cheap angle grinder. Even more unlike Newman, who attracted complaints about being tight-fisted when it came to investing, Casey has been flashing the cash along with the enigmatic smiles and the incendiary feistiness.

In the first episode, she invested €80,000 in Savvybear, an online children’s game made with technology that much of the rest of the panel found cute but uninspiring and a few years out of date. In doing so, she was accused of pulling a fast one on fellow dragon Niall O’Farrell. Having agreed to go halves with him, she undercut his offer and took the whole thing for herself.

Judging by Gavin Duffy’s reaction, viewers might have been forgiven for thinking she had breached some unwritten code of business morality of which they were unaware.

“Did you see that?” Duffy commented to John Joyce, the delighted inventor of Savvybear. “She has just stabbed her colleague in the back.”

The sparks continued to fly in episodes two and three and Casey invested again last week, this time in an online retail website. She is now well ahead of her female predecessor at this early stage of the series in terms of money invested. But then Newman attracted complaints for investing nothing at all in 2009.

Even if much of the hurly-burly between the panel is played up for the cameras, and designed to boost a show some see as a tired format, it is almost irrelevant. Casey’s unnerving and unwavering chutzpah may well help pull the future of the Dragons’ Den out of the fire of telly bankruptcy.

If she is doing better than Newman, it wouldn’t be the first time she has been seen to come out one better than the dotcom millionaire. In 2007, when Newman was the judges’ favourite for the Veuve Cliquot businesswoman of the year award, Casey was given it by default when the champagne company overruled the panel’s decision on the grounds that, at the time, Newman, who had made a fortune when she sold her needahotel.com website, was not in charge of a company.

Casey would baulk at any suggestion she likes to get one over on a fellow businesswoman, keen as she is to show off her feminist credentials at every opportunity. She even took one hopeful entrepreneur, Marian Moloney, to task over the size of the cleavage on her Irish Mythological Dolls, a product she was attempting to sell to the dragons.

Casey likes to promote the cause of mna na hEireann through the Enterprise Network for Women, giving it her time, and free advertising in her magazines. She is fiercely proud of her own Irish Tatler woman of the year awards. “We have a great tradition of women in business in Ireland but it has mainly been in part-time enterprise such as crafts,” she said in a recent interview. “I think a lot of this was because women with families were limited to part-time work, and if there were no such jobs available, they went and started their own small businesses, usually in the service area. Where they have struggled is in getting to the next level, moving up to becoming an employer and an SME [small and medium-sized enterprise].”

The former nurse has already smashed through the corporate glass ceiling. Casey is the chief executive of Harmonia, a magazine group that publishes U, Irish Tatler, Food & Wine and Woman’s Way, as well as a number of in-house publications and contract magazines. The company was established in 2004, after Casey headed up a successful buyout of Smurfit Publishing’s magazine titles.

Casey guided Harmonia through a successful revamp of its titles and earned healthy profits during the boom years. The company recorded a series of decent surpluses, including over €670,000 in 2007. Predictably, the recession has resulted in a downturn in fortunes since, and it reported a loss of just over €180,000 in 2009.

That year, “employment costs” at the company were reduced by 14% and the directors — Casey and her husband Richard Hannaford — cut their own remuneration by 37%, but job losses amounted to only four out of 48.

Harmonia also owns the online magazine iVenus and the publisher currently has designs on overseas markets, such as China, where Casey has been making business trips in recent months. As for her ambitions for potential Dragons’ Den investments, Casey says she is not looking to invest in publishing ideas, but would like to try ones outside her comfort zone, specifically fashion and food.

According to friends, Casey likes to get what she wants the way she wants it. Her straight-talking charm can easily turn to, well, just plain straight talking, if things don’t go in the desired direction, according to one industry colleague.

She doesn’t always get what she wants though. In 2007, Harmonia lost the contract for Cara magazine, Aer Lingus’s long-running inflight publication, to a company run by former employee Mary Kershaw. The magazine went on to win the PPAI customer magazine of the year in 2008, and Casey has brought Kershaw to the High Court. The businesswoman’s statement of claim alleged that Kershaw gave commercially sensitive information to Maxmedia, the new publishers of Cara, which helped it to win the contract. The allegation is denied and the case is due to be heard shortly.

Casey comes from a relatively humble background. Born in 1960, she was one of six children and the daughter of a ranger who worked in Phoenix Park. The family lived in a lodge in the park where, Casey says, she had an idyllic childhood.

She went to St Joseph’s convent in Stanhope Street, leaving at 16 to become a student nurse in Scotland. “I thought I would be the next Florence Nightingale; wander down the wards wearing broderie anglaise hats with gorgeous surgeons. Of course, the reality wasn’t anything like that,” she once said. Instead she found the work of dealing with burns and plastic surgery “brutal” and not for her.

In the 1980s, she started a course in journalism, having discovered she was “quite good at writing”. She did a National Council for the Training of Journalists qualification in London and by 1988 was editor of the Nursing Standard. She eventually became editor of the Irish Post, a London-based publication owned by the Smurfit Group.

Casey moved back to Dublin at the turn of the millennium to a job running Smurfit Publications. Her entry into the domestic magazine scene was not a happy one, however. No sooner had she got her feet under the desk than she discovered some of the Smurfit titles had been massaging circulation figures. Casey had to engage in an embarrassing series of compensation negotiations with disgruntled advertisers.

In 2004, when Jefferson Smurfit decided to sell its magazine publishing wing, Casey put together a bid to buy it and was successful in a deal reported to be worth somewhere between €3m and €5m.

Casey’s public profile began to rise as she made a success of the new company. She became a staple of media social diary columns, popping up at charity events and awards ceremonies.

She now lives in Ranelagh with Hannaford, her husband, and her son. A lover of fashion, she helps promote the work of indigenous designers and, despite being a regular at glossy social events, one acquaintance says she is no Brown Thomas-addicted clothes horse: “She is not appearance-obsessed; you have to admire her for that. You never see her dressed head to toe in expensive labels.”

Labels with “Ltd” attached might be more to her taste. Once someone named a famous London publisher and told Casey: “If you play your cards right, those people might be interested in buying you out next year.” The dragon bared her teeth and replied: “If I play my cards right, I might buy them out.”