david walsh travel

David Walsh

Journalist | travel writer.

Travel plans

I’ve been fortunate enough to travel widely over the years; for work, for leisure and whilst living abroad.

Here’s how my travel plans are shaping up for the year ahead:

May: Fort William, Scotland

July:   Interrailing around Europe (Rotterdam, Hamburg, Berlin, Budapest, Trieste, Marseille and Paris)

April: Mallorca, Spain

March: Rajasthan, India

October:  Brooklyn, New York

March: Lisbon, Portugal

February :  Outer Hebrides, Scotland

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Travel company Joe Walsh Tours reopens six months after ceasing trading

KPMG were appointed liquidators of the company, who put the business back up for sale in May.

Six months after ceasing trade, Ireland’s oldest and largest travel agent and tour operator is set to reopen.

Joe Walsh Pilgrimtours Ltd, trading under a number of different brand names, shut its doors in April of this year as a result of the pandemic and said it was unable to fulfil its obligations to customers.

The company had a bond in place to cover all passengers who had booked package trips.

Following an extensive sales process, David Walsh, who had been involved in running the firm prior to its closure, announced he has acquired the business and certain assets of Joe Walsh Pilgrimtours Ltd including the Joe Walsh Tours brand.

Other brands purchased as part of the arrangement include Pilgrimages Abroad & Concorde Travel.

“We are delighted to announce the re-opening of Joe Walsh Tours," a spokesman said.

"Parishes, group leaders, dioceses and special interest groups around Ireland have repeatedly voiced their need for the assistance of a specialist licensed and bonded group travel company, when co-ordinating foreign group travel and we are ready to facilitate these groups."

The Commission for Aviation Regulation is still in the process of refunding all former customers of Joe Walsh Pilgrimtours Ltd who were due to depart from the Republic of Ireland.

Joe Walsh Tours was founded in 1961 by Co Down native Joe Walsh, and became well known for specialised tours to pilgrimage destinations.

Prior to the pandemic, the company had offices in the UK, Europe, and the US and employed more than 100 people.

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International Edition

As labor secretary, Walsh hits the road for the Biden administration

WASHINGTON — Former Boston mayor Martin J. Walsh did not travel all that much before joining President Biden’s Cabinet as labor secretary in early 2021. But since then, he’s been a road warrior for the White House.

A straight-talking (and r-dropping) emissary to blue and red states alike, Walsh has carried a message of the administration’s labor successes — a strong job market and the promise of more work to come from the $1.2 trillion infrastructure law — as Democrats try to counter the pervasive economic gloom many Americans feel from rapidly growing inflation.

In his 15 months on the job, Walsh has visited more than 80 cities in 37 states, adding Arkansas and Mississippi this past week. And his experiences have been as varied as the accents he’s heard in his effort to learn more about improving the nation’s workforce and fixing the pandemic-damaged supply chain.

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He’s ventured deep into a coal mine in West Virginia with one of the state’s senators, Joe Manchin; ridden shotgun next to a trucker in Pennsylvania; met with tribal leaders at a Native American pueblo in New Mexico; and received a personal tour of a Tesla factory in Texas by chief executive Elon Musk.

“He’s not sitting behind some desk in Washington only looking at the stats,” said Randall Woodfin, the mayor of Birmingham, Ala., who hosted a visit of his fellow Democrat Walsh last fall. There to announce a $15-an-hour minimum wage for federal contract workers and see the city’s workforce development efforts, Walsh impressed Woodfin with his ability to listen and talk honestly about the challenges of providing more good-paying jobs.

Traveling around the country is part of a Cabinet secretary’s portfolio, but Walsh has been particularly itinerant. He said the trips help him better understand the nation and its workers after taking the helm of a department with about 15,000 employees, tasked with overseeing federal labor laws and occupational safety. His tenure got off to an uneven start, caused by pandemic restrictions and questions about his last days as mayor when he appointed Dennis A. White to be police commissioner .

On the road, Walsh has hit his stride.

“We have a very diverse country . . . but at the end of the day I find the commonality between Americans is they want to be able to support their family and create opportunities for their family,” Walsh said in a recent interview in his Labor Department office, which overlooks the National Mall. “They want to be able to have a house. . . . They want to put their kids on a pathway to success, whether it’s a farmer in Pennsylvania or a hospital worker in Phoenix.”

When he travels, Walsh said, his job as labor secretary is to avoid politics and focus on problems and solutions. One of his major projects is modernizing state unemployment benefit programs, which were overwhelmed during the pandemic. The American Rescue Plan gave the Labor Department $2 billion for the effort that encompasses blue and red states.

“I represent union workers. I represent nonunion workers. I represent Democrats. I represent Republicans,” he said. “I say, ‘How do we make sure Americans have access to good jobs?’ ”

But his roving has stirred some controversy, as well — not for where he goes on official travel during the week, but for where he goes on most weekends. In a highly unusual step for a Cabinet secretary, Walsh has not moved to Washington. Instead, he pays out of his own pocket to stay in a hotel when he’s in the capital during the week and then flies back to Boston on the weekends when he does not have work obligations.

Two House Republicans wrote to Walsh in December criticizing what they called his “atypical living arrangement.” But Walsh said his extensive travels around the country and his family back in Boston — his longtime partner, Lorrie Higgins, and his mother still live there — mean it doesn’t make sense financially for him to get a place in Washington. The arrangement hasn’t hindered his ability to do the job, Walsh said.

“As a matter of fact, it gives me the opportunity to kind of recharge and kind of do my thing at home and be active and talk to people on the ground,” he said.

Republican criticism has faded and Walsh was not asked about his weekends in Boston during recent congressional hearings about the Labor Department budget. A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request about concerns over his living arrangements. But Biden, who has called Walsh a friend, has been clear he approves of Walsh’s performance, telling the annual convention of the AFL-CIO last month that “he’s doing a hell of a job.”

Walsh said he believes Biden is doing a great job, too, brushing off criticism from some Democrats about the president’s advanced age and low approval ratings, which have prompted questions about whether he should run again in 2024.

Walsh said Biden remains “upbeat” and described him as “laser-focused” when they met at the Port of Los Angeles last month with officials from the dockworkers union and shipping companies as they try to avoid a strike that could further snarl the supply chain and push prices for some goods higher. Preventing any disruptions after the union contract expired Friday is a major challenge for Walsh, who has been monitoring the negotiations and said Thursday that the continuing talks were going smoothly .

“President Biden knew that this was not going to be a job you go into and just have all successes,” Walsh said. “Quite honestly, any time I’ve spoken to him about the poll numbers I tell him not to worry about them. Just run the country because that’s what the American people wanted you here for.”

Walsh, a former union president, and Biden both strongly support organized labor. Walsh has cheered recent successful efforts by Amazon and Starbucks workers to unionize and is a supporter of legislation that expands federal protections for workers trying to organize and collectively bargain. He also has expressed concerns about companies classifying some gig economy workers as independent contractors instead of employees, which often entitles them to fewer benefits. Last year, the Labor Department withdrew a pending Trump administration rule that would have made it easier for companies to classify workers as contractors.

Last week, @POTUS shared some of our progress in supporting our trucking workforce - including the nationwide expansion of Registered Apprenticeship programs. I hitched a ride with Steve Fields to @Yellow_Trucking 's apprenticeship program launch to chat about what this means. pic.twitter.com/3oal3Vxin7 — Secretary Marty Walsh (@SecMartyWalsh) April 11, 2022

Walsh has pushed to expand private apprenticeship programs and the Labor Department recently reduced the amount of time it takes to get one approved in the worker-starved trucking industry, leading to more than 100 new programs launched in a 90-day period this year. His emphasis on apprenticeships and other initiatives to help businesses find more workers resonated with members of the Austin Chamber of Commerce when he spoke with them during their annual trip to Washington last month, said Laura Huffman, the group’s president.

“I felt like it was the beginning of a conversation. It wasn’t just a one-hour speech and then we moved on,” she said, noting that he offered to travel to Austin to learn more.

Walsh has the benefit of being able to tout one of the administration’s few recent bright spots as prices rocket up and stocks tumble: a strong labor market that has produced record job growth. He acknowledges the challenge of high inflation, although he downplayed fears of a recession as the Federal Reserve raises interest rates to try to bring down prices.

“The reality is this is a global inflationary issue,” Walsh said, blaming supply-chain problems and the war in Ukraine for sending prices higher. He remains optimistic about the economy, citing his observations traveling the nation with an eye out for construction cranes as a former building trades worker.

“I see a lot of cranes across the country,” he said. “Raising the interest rates might have a bit of an impact on financing some of these projects, but there’s enough projects in the ground right now moving forward that growth is going to happen.”

Jim Puzzanghera can be reached at [email protected] . Follow him @JimPuzzanghera .

The Journalist Who Says ‘I Told You So’ About Lance Armstrong

For 13 years, journalist David Walsh pursued his theory that Lance was doping, but the USDA’s recent announcement finally vindicated his long-held beliefs with hard evidence

Rachel Nuwer

Journalist David Walsh wasn’t alone in his suspicions about Lance Armstrong, but he was one of the few who dared voice them. For 13 years, the Irishman pursued his theory that Lance was doping, but the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s recent announcement finally vindicated his long-held beliefs with hard evidence.

Walsh first suspected that Armstrong of doping when the cyclist reacted irascibly in 1999 when a young French competitor claimed that all the top riders were doping. Armstrong bullied the Frenchman out of the race, and Walsh’s ears perked. “My feeling at that moment was that a clean rider wouldn’t have done that,” he told the Press Gazette . “It was pretty obvious to me that Armstrong was doping – not from any evidence I had but from the way he behaved.”

On the day Armstrong won his first of seven Tour de France titles, Walsh wrote in The Sunday Times, “This afternoon I will be keeping my arms by my side, because I’m not sure this is something we should be applauding.”

Flustered, Armstrong later invited the journalist to a private interview. As Walsh told the Press Gazette:

“He rang me because he knew I was asking a lot of questions and he thought that if I come along, and he’s really nice to me, and he gives me a one-on-one interview, I’ll be as happy as every other journalist and I’ll become his friend.”

Walsh, however, refused to talk about anything other than doping during the interview, which, not surprisingly, turned out to be the last time Armstrong invited him to speak in a one-on-one setting.

While Walsh published two books questioning Armstrong’s story, outlets such as the BBC refused to pursue Walsh’s leads because, he says, they did not want to lose Armstrong as a source.

Walsh suspects he saw through Armstrong’s front because the cyclist’s legend and allure extended not just to viewers but to journalists, too. Fellow journalists became “fans with typewriters,” while Walsh couldn’t shake the feeling that Armstrong’s victory lacked validity and integrity. Walsh continued:

“People always used to say that I was the cynic. You might find this strange, but I’m the only one who isn’t cynical, because all the guys who had a sense that he was cheating but thought it was too much trouble to investigate it, that it would make their lives messy – to me they are the cynics.”

Journalists like the Associated Press’ John Leicester who did not pick up on or voice concerns about Armstrong are now lamenting their unwillingness to cause waves. Leicester writes for AP:

Was I negligent, even willfully blind? I’d like to think not. I heard the mounting drumbeat of suspicion that surrounded Armstrong’s ever-longer string of wins and mentioned it in reports from the Tour, which I covered from 2003-2006. But, in light of USADA’s findings, I now wish that I had reported the doubts more prominently. Hindsight is very illuminating. I also read the work of colleagues—David Walsh, Pierre Ballester, Damien Ressiot and others—who defied Armstrong’s myth-making, power and lawyers, dug deeply, and produced books and reports alleging or suggesting he doped. They’re among the few who emerge from all this with enhanced reputations.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Report Suggests Armstrong Not Just a Doper But a Pusher  Lance Armstrong Surrenders Against Doping Charges and Will be Banned for Life 

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Rachel Nuwer | | READ MORE

Rachel Nuwer is a freelance science writer based in Brooklyn.

Michael Walsh: a pioneer of the Irish travel industry and lifelong pilgrim

An appreciation.

Michael Walsh: first person to operate a pilgrimage by air from Ireland to the Holy Land

Michael Walsh was a pioneer of the Irish travel industry during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, specialising in pilgrimages to Lourdes, Rome, the Holy Land and other sacred sites. Michael was a founding member and the first president of the Irish Association of Travel Agents. He was the first person to operate a pilgrimage by air from Ireland to the Holy Land and was the first Irish travel agent to secure an integrated charter contract with Aer Lingus. For his achievements, Pope John Paul II awarded Michael the Cross for Church and Pontiff gold medal in 1985.

While attending UCD late in 1946, Michael saw an advertisement in a magazine: “The Most Dangerous Job in the World – Join the Palestine Police.” And that’s precisely what he did. He ran away from home and college to Palestine and discovered the Holy Land, a place he would spend the rest of his life returning to. His knowledge and passion for the Land of the Cross was second to none and his greatest calling was to lead pilgrims as they read the scriptures and walked in the footsteps of Jesus.

As a young man, Michael travelled coast to coast across the US and Canada, riding the rails and hitchhiking. In 1950, he walked to Rome and met the pope. On the strength of publishing his account of that journey he established his business, Michael Walsh Travel of D’Olier Street, Dublin, with the motto: “I travel with you”.

Detail from The Sea of Galilee by Michael Walsh 1998 (Oil on canvas 76 X 76cm)

He made films of his travels which he took on lecture tours and spoke about in every parish hall in the country.

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He also wrote and published several books.

For leisure, Michael headed inland towards the heart of Ireland to navigate and explore his beloved river Shannon. Aboard a four-berth timber cabin-cruiser christened Red Hugh, these adventures were shared largely with his children David, Brian, Susan, Conor and Nuala, their cousins and many friends. This was no leisure cruise; this was epic adventure on the high seas of Lough Derg and Lough Ree as Michael pursued his goal of charting the length and breadth of the inland waterways of Ireland. A book was duly published called Shannon Days.

In his later years, Michael wrote his memoirs and painted pictures. He asked me to teach him to paint early in 1990 and so we worked together for several months. This set in motion a late flowering of creativity during which he produced a body of work which is as unique and extraordinary as he was. He painted his vision in oil on canvas of all the great and glorious sacred places he shared with the countless pilgrims who travelled with him.

Dad passed away peacefully on Easter Saturday at the age of 92 surrounded by his family. He lived an exceptionally long, involved and multifaceted life which he shared so generously with his wife May – his loving soulmate for 65 years – their five children, 10 grandchildren, six great-grandchildren, three sisters, extended family and innumerable friends in every corner of the world who will never forget his enthusiasm, integrity and kindness.

Born: September 9th, 1926

Died: April 20th, 2019

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How MONA’s David Walsh shocked our top stock pickers

Professional gambler and arts impresario David Walsh had a brutal message for successful top money managers – you may just be lucky.

There’s something magnetic about David Walsh, the professional gambler and owner of the iconic Museum of Old & New Art, who stole the show at the Sohn Hearts & Minds Conference in Hobart.

Anyone who has visited MONA (which hosted Thursday night’s pre-conference welcome ) knows that the mercurial and mischievous Walsh loves to provoke a reaction. And he was quite happy to pour a bucket of cold water on the stock pickers, investment bankers and business people who would justifiably consider themselves the cream of Australia’s financial sector.

David Walsh was the showstopper at the Sohn Hearts and Minds conference.  

Walsh’s message to the 600-strong audience at the seventh annual Sohn conference? You’ve probably just been lucky.

Over the course of a fascinating 35-minute conversation with Andrew Denton – which was unquestionably the thought-provoking moment of the event – Walsh recounted the fascinating story of MONA’s establishment with what he considers the ill-gotten gains of his gambling career.

“All I do is redistribute money, and there’s no sense of accomplishment in it,” Walsh archly told the room full of money managers, sipping from a foaming Campari.

But it was Walsh’s career as a gambler that most fascinated the room full of professional risk-takers.

He explained how he dropped out of studying maths at university in Hobart and fell in with what he described as a bad, but fun crowd.

“They wanted me because I could do sums. And I wanted them because they could talk to girls.”

This enterprise, which is led by Rich Lister and Walsh’s great friend, Zeljko Ranogajec , started counting cards while playing blackjack at the Hobart casino and eventually took its act on the road. Walsh told the audience how he and his crew loved to visit Las Vegas for what was called the “Gorilla Big Play” on the nights when big boxing matches would be held, stationing card counters across the floor of a casino to take advantage of the increase in bet limits.

Walsh revealed that the syndicate, which Ranogajec still leads, bets about $10 billion a year across horse racing, sports betting and even lotteries. One of their biggest wins was a $63 million haul from a big horse race run in Tokyo on Christmas Eve, but Walsh said the crew won even more about six months ago betting on a German lottery that had jackpotted several times. The syndicate bought $11 million worth of tickets.

He only found out about the Tokyo win a week after the race was run.

“If you have to worry about whether your bets are winning, your bets are not going to win if you haven’t already got the system resolved to the point where it’s real.”

‘If your system has worked for 20 years, it’s luck’

What makes Walsh so engaging is his ability to be brutally honest about his own strengths and weaknesses – not because of some sense of modesty, but because of logic and maths.

For example, becoming a professional gambler as a young man was silly, given he knew that the world was full of failed professional gamblers.

Walsh joked that he should have ended up in the street or, even worse, in the audience of the Sohn conference.

“If you assess it with the information that was available to me at the time, it was literally the worst decision I’ve ever made. It turned out well.”

This was down to luck, Walsh said. When the syndicate started betting bigger amounts and playing a wider range of games, Walsh went back and checked the maths of the systems it was using. What he found was that the syndicate’s edge over the house was not nearly as strong as they thought it was, and there was an 80 per cent to 90 per cent chance that the whole enterprise would be bankrupted because it was betting too much. So while Walsh thought he had a system that could beat the market, it turned out he was mainly lucky.

“That means nine out of every 10 people with a similar set of skills than me go broke,” Walsh said.

The lesson equally applies to investors, Walsh argued – even the top ones assembled at the Sohn conference.

“Finding a system that works and is stable and works for a long time is extremely difficult. If you’ve had a system that works for 20 years, it’s not as a result of skill. You acquire the system that worked by luck, then once it worked, it might keep working,” Walsh explained.

“The cohort here is probably a cohort who were mostly successful. But there is another cohort [that] would fill a stadium of people, that had similarly realised appropriate strategies, that either overbet them or simply chose strategies that didn’t work in the long run or failed to maintain those strategies. But there’s no difference in the level of skill of those that failed and those that succeeded.”

This was a challenging message for the rapt audience of money managers to hear. The idea that experience, skills and a system can deliver solid returns over time is central to everything professional investors do.

But Walsh’s underlying message was that hubris is a dangerous thing – your “edge” over the market may well be an illusion.

Walsh said he was currently pouring resources and energy into finding ways to protect the income of his syndicate from artificial intelligence. He’s some way off, but believes having data sets with unique observations that are not widely available could provide a way to tilt markets to the syndicate’s benefits.

But don’t expect to see him playing in financial markets. Walsh said 40 years studying equity markets had suggested that while they do rise over time in a random way, the other side of the equation worried him.

“What is not clear to me is whether the variance, the amount of risk, isn’t also going up. If it is, and if that variance is expanding faster than the growth of the market, then one day it will all turn to shit.”

‘The future is worth the risk’

Using artificial intelligence to predict flash crashes in markets, and trading the other side of those events, might be one way to use algorithmic trading in financial markets.

Walsh has plenty of incentive to protect his gambling income – he revealed MONA’s annual losses had blown out to $25 million.

And while the museum has been a boon for Tasmanian tourism, Walsh warned his Sohn hosts that there can be side-effects to philanthropy. The explosion of tourism numbers had led to an explosion in the number of Hobart properties on Airbnb.

“I created a homelessness problem, or I co-created it. It’s really hard to do good without side-effects.”

It’s not the worst problem to have, of course. The Sohn event, the brainchild of a group that includes Barrenjoey founders Matthew Grounds and Guy Fowler, veteran investor Gary Weiss and counts key supporters including Premier Investments’ Solomon Lew, Wilson Asset Management’s Geoff Wilson, Chris Cuffe and UBS veteran Michael Walsh, has raised over $40 million for medical research over the last six years, and was set to make a big addition to that after Friday’s event.

You might think Walsh has enough to keep him occupied, including what he described as an eternal battle with the Australian Taxation Office .

“Every 10 years I lose. And in between I do not win,” he joked.

But he’s also taking aim at a curious but common problem: queuing. He and a team is working on technology that will use location services to try to eliminate queues in settings such as restaurants. It’s a little example of how one of Australia’s most fascinating minds keeps whirring, and looking forward.

“The future is foreign country, but I think it’s worth visiting,” Walsh said. “The future is worth the risk.”

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