CASEY PLEDGED TO MAKE A BID FOR THE PRESIDENCY – WAY BACK IN 1981
ON November 4, 1981, as Peter Casey left his family home in Derry to move to the other side of the world, he assured his mother: ‘I’ll be back one day, don’t worry, I’m going to stand for President.’
The Dragons’ Den star grew up in the Troubles in the North, went on to become a multimillionaire businessman, attempted a run at the Seanad and now is fulfilling that youthful aspiration.
The father-of-five was born and reared in Derry, and came from a family of nine children where his gaeilgeoir mother survived from ‘pay cheque to pay cheque’, as he recalled in a 2016 interview.
Having graduated in business and politics from Aston University in Birmingham, the entrepreneur’s big break came about when he took a job working as a graduate trainee in sales with the major global firm Xerox.
This opportunity meant a move to Australia – quite the distance from the comfort of his Derry home. But it was here that he rose through the ranks in the company and realised ‘hard work really does make a difference’ which motivated him to ‘work harder than everyone else’, as he explained in a 2013 interview.
It was in Australia he met his Crumlin-born wife, where she was backpacking, and the pair went on to have five children, two boys and three girls.
Together 28 years, they have since lived in Atlanta in the United States, where their daughters are in university. But he is currently thinking of moving back to Ireland.
In 1993, Peter Casey founded Claddagh Resources which he describes as being ‘an executive recruitment firm with offices in Donegal, Dublin, Chicago, Atlanta and Sydney’.
His biography, distributed by his PR team yesterday morning to launch his campaign, informs readers that he was honoured as a ‘leading Irish-American businessman by Irish America magazine’ and that ‘two decades ago, I was invited to participate in the White House Good Friday peace talks’.
While home is currently Atlanta, he is slowing moving back across the Atlantic.
This tilt at the Áras isn’t his first run for public office, and in 2016 he entered the race for a seat in the Seanad after been nominated by Ibec for the Industrial and Commercial Panel, but this was unsuccessful.
Despite this run, he says he was never a member of a political party.