Who is Niall Harbison?

Now I hate to always be that guy, but I have questions!

The reader will likely already have an idea of who the revolutionary Irish maverick is, or you wouldn’t have clicked the link. If, however you somehow arrived here by accident and don’t have the foggiest, please allow me to provide as brief a synopsis as I can, and perhaps a couple of details you might have missed.

Social and mainstream media have been ablaze the last few months to years, with his heartwarming and heroic endeavours to almost single handedly save every street dog in Thailand and eliminate literally half the entire world’s population of stray dogs, circa 250,000,000. It’s an oft repeated, if somewhat preposterous claim, referenced here on a recent Fox news interview (Time stamp 5:10) for anyone interested in referencing what I have to say. In the same interview he claims to have performed his first surgery in the street after some local dog feeders showed him how to (he doesn’t mention if they were veterinarians or where he got the anesthesia from) @4:15
Increasing to 300 the next year in 2022. Having taught myself the same procedure over many years and being assisted/shown by numerous qualified vets, possessing an equipped veterinary clinic and lots of practice in advance on cadavers, I confess to being somewhat impressed!

Our hero’s journey starts a little before 2022 though, as the only child of a supposed EU commission diplomat who’s remarkably camera and news shy for someone in such a role but might conceivably be this guy based on the name and other connections. After his Mum left the family without saying goodbye to her 13yr old son to move in with a violent abuser, thus triggering Niall’s adulthood battle with hard drugs and alcohol, Niall fell off the rails. At 15 he’d been held back in school for 2 years sharing a classroom with 12yr olds and eventually being excluded from schools by 16.

Luckily Niall got a second break when he was around 17 to 18 by enrolling in the University of Dublin for a catering course and also lucked a job while still studying, working for the Michelin star Dublin restaurant Peacock Alley, with no experience, owned by temporarily incarcerated mafia chef Conrad Gallagher (I swear I’m not making it up) where he developed a nasty cocaine habit, yet went on to become Ireland’s youngest head chef at age 20. From there, he somehow struck gold in-between taking lots of drink & drugs on ski-slopes and beaches around the world and spent (his accounts vary) somewhere between 18 months and 4 & ½ years working on luxury yachts as a personal chef to some of the world’s very richest people including Bill Gates (who calls him by the nickname ‘Irish’), Bono, Robbie Williams, Victoria Beckham, royalty, Paris Hilton, Angelina Jolie and in particular, for the longest time, with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen on his mega yachts Octopus and Tatoosh, whilst seemingly unaffected by NDAs.

During this time his dependency issues spiralled since, seemingly, the mega rich don’t mind drunk & drugged out young 20-something-year-old-staff jacuzziing in €150,000 worth of guest’s champagne according to one anecdote. After quitting Paul Allen’s employ aboard the Tatoosh, with dreams of starting his own business, and enjoying some of that billionaire high life for himself, as explicitly detailed here (the only link worth clicking imho unless you understandably doubt what I’m writing). What’s odd about Niall’s second TedTalk story of course is that Paul Allen was still the owner of the vessel at that time, only in his early 50s, in perfect and active health, in direct contrast to the dying and invalided octogenarian he recounts.

Picking up the pace a little, so this doesn’t take as long as Paul Allen did to die: After quitting this dream job Niall setup a failed food/media/tech startup called ifoods.tv which inexplicably burned ½ a million Euros in 2007 (and I can find no registered business details for in Ireland, UK, Europe or USA, (something that seems to be a recurring pattern in the multi-million startups he’s claimed to have founded such as here, here, here and especially here, here and here (£1.7mil, for that?)
But not before it featured prominently in media and on the popular yet staged-AF reality TV show Dragon’s Den in 2008 (timestamp 30mins), to the lauded praise of the ‘dragons’ and the instruction that Niall is one to watch.

Anyway, shortly after that he made his first million in 1,000 days, wrote his first bestselling book and went on to become a tech/media extraordinaire (with no experience in those fields), gave two TedTalks, and courted non-stop media praise and promotion, until in 2019/20 he sacked off his multimillionaire lifestyle to live in Koh Sumui, Thailand. Where he went inexplicably viral for a post pushing the convid nonsense, with supposedly 6.6million views. Shortly after that he claims to have nearly drank himself to death, then reinvented himself as someone who can do what hundreds of dedicated, talented and experienced professionals, with huge amounts of local support and experience couldn’t over decades, overnight?

There’s no evidence from his storytelling that he can blitzkrieg over the innumerable complexities the world’s largest mass sterilizing campaign would involve, such as local partner, government and community buy in. He claims to have sterilised 45,737 dogs in 2024. A truly astonishing number (with no basis in reality). By his own estimate each sterilisation is around $50 per dog, The numbers he’s claiming to have achieved in 2024 would cost a cool $2,286,850 alone, and would be 880 sterilizations a week, or 176 per day if the pro-bono vets are working 5 day weeks and working superhumanly way past anything I could manage.

After learning all of the above (along with so much more I don’t want to bore you with) and years of experience with wildlife and companion animal sanctuaries in Asia, I was to say the least suspicious and reached out to the other independent animal organisations I knew in Thailand. None had heard of him or the largest dog sterilisation programme the world has ever seen and laughed at the absurdity of what he’s claiming.
Neither had the Thai government, which is particularly odd as he’s claiming, and raising large sums of opaque donations, to reduce the Buddhist nation’s dog population by half. Does he have their permission to do this? A letter of agreement perhaps?

But more pertinently, why did the world’s global media and celebrities (from Liam Gallagher to Ben Fogle go so hard in lockstep [BBC, Hello, Sky, ITV, CBC, Sydney Morning Herald, NME, Daily Mail, People, Mirror, Fox, The Dodo, Times, AOL, Independent, MSN, Metro, Newsweek, Yahoo, and TEDx just to scratch the surface,
to promote this seemingly obvious (and possibly glow in the dark) fraud, without assessing any of his core claims? No fact checks on this one, no verifying sources from groups that have been tackling the same intractable problems over decades? A friend of mine has a razor “If they’re a household name, they’re in the game” and given how often this chap’s been recommended to me as someone I should reach out to, that seems to apply here. Why has this clown been so ubiquitously promoted, was it just to steal hundreds of thousands of pounds from people that actually care about the causes he claims to? Is he just another humiliation ritual that causes a great many to mistake bitter for sweet because they saw a photo of a sick puppy, because they’re a dime a dozen in Asia and I don’t see anyone credibly trying to make a difference being so loudly broadcast by the MSM.

Why are we being shown these things ultimately I guess and is our discernment up to the task?

Does anyone get their money back if he fails in his stated objective to reduce the world’s population of dogs by half? He’s explicit in claiming that every life not born is one that he’s saved. I’ve run large Catch, Neuter and Release programs myself. Most street dogs are in a permanent state of pregnancy, which is not easy to tell as their bellies and mammary glands only distend roughly a week prepartum. So it involves surgically removing uteruses that more often than not contain 5-10 kicking puppies inside. Injecting their tiny hearts with barbiturates to ease their passing never felt like saving them to be honest and caused me many dark nights of the soul, I’m surprised he never speaks on that. But my suspicion is, he wouldn’t know that that’s the procedure, because he’s still to perform his first…

Thank you for reading whoever you are, and good luck with it all!