Latest news with #SimonCoveney
Irish Times
22-07-2025
- Business
- Irish Times
Reliance ‘powering forward' in its centenary year as revenues jump
Reliance, the Cork-headquartered engineering and robotics component distributor where former tánaiste Simon Coveney was appointed as a non-executive director earlier this year, reported revenues of close to €20 million last year as domestic sales jumped 14 per cent. Accounts filed recently for the Reliance Bearing and Gear Company, which celebrates a century in business this year, reveal turnover climbed by more than 11 per cent to just under €19.6 million in 2024. Reliance distributes a range of mechanical, electrical and agricultural products, specialising in automation and robotics. The family-owned company is based in Little Island, Co Cork, but opened a 60,000sq ft facility on the eastern outskirts of Limerick city in 2019 and opened another facility in Antrim last year. Operating profits at Reliance were up slightly to €958,033 in 2024 from €913,422 in 2023, according to the accounts. READ MORE After-tax profits, meanwhile, dipped to €829,380 from more than €2.3 million in 2023. However, the 2023 figures were impacted by a nearly €1.2 million one-off exceptional item, related to the write-back of an asset revaluation in previous years. Speaking to The Irish Times on Monday, Reliance chief executive Peter Creighton said the company is 'very in tune' with the wider Irish economy and consequently performed well last year. David McWilliams on how 'big incentives' to build could save Dublin city Listen | 36:51 He said the company is 'powering forward' in its centenary year and will be opening up a facility in Dundalk, Co Louth, in 2025 on the 'automation and robotics side' of the business. Mr Creighton said that 2025 has so far been a little bit flatter than last year. 'An awful lot of that has to do with what's happening, the uncertainty with tariffs and Trump and all that stuff,' he said. Earlier this year, the company, which employed 50 people in 2024, announced that Mr Coveney would join Reliance's board as a non-executive director in his first private sector appointment after leaving politics. [ Simon Coveney joins Reliance board as non-executive director Opens in new window ] Mr Creighton said at the time that Mr Coveney's 'extensive experience and proven leadership' will be an important addition to the company. The former Fine Gael TD for Cork South-Central, who held several senior cabinet positions during his career, was subsequently hired by EY Ireland as a consultant to its geopolitical strategy unit. Reliance is a fourth-generation company that was founded in 1925 by Mr Creighton's great-grandfather, Horace Rhodes Kenworthy, as the Reliance Bearing and Gear Company. Mr Creighton holds almost 50 per cent of the company's shares, according to its most recent annual return, while Horace and Laura Kenworthy hold a combined stake of just under 40 per cent.
Irish Times
20-07-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
As abortions triple, when will we admit that reluctant repealers were profoundly wrong?
Strange, isn't it, how often this pattern repeats? We are assured in stentorian tones that not only is something never going to happen, but it is scaremongering and manipulative even to suggest that it will. Then we are told that it has happened, and furthermore, it is unequivocally a good thing. Before the repeal of the Eighth Amendment, we were assured that all that would happen was that a similar number to the 2,879 women who travelled to England and Wales in 2018 would no longer have to do so. Then-tánaiste Simon Coveney believed the argument, though he said 'removing the equal right to life of the unborn from our Constitution [was] not something I easily or immediately supported'. In an oped, he said any woman choosing abortion after a three-day waiting period and other safeguards 'is very likely to have travelled to the UK or accessed a pill online in the absence of such a system being available in Ireland'. He and other reluctant repealers were promised that numbers of abortions would not rise rapidly and inexorably. The latest abortion figures show 10,852 abortions in Ireland in 2024 . There were 54,062 live births in 2024 . For every five babies born alive, one was aborted. READ MORE Is there no number of abortions that would be unacceptable? If one in two pregnancies was ending in abortion, would that be too many? UK Department of Health figures show the number of women giving Irish addresses for abortions halved between 2001 and 2018, with a 5 per cent drop from 2017. Numbers were dropping before Repeal, in other words. Even allowing for the tiny number in 2018 of Irish-based women having abortions in the Netherlands and those using illegal abortion pills, the rise in numbers of abortions is shocking. Some 55,000 of them have taken place in Ireland since Repeal. The reality is that restrictions on abortion reduce abortion numbers. US advocacy group Secular Pro-life has a useful summary of the evidence. Many studies claiming restrictive abortion laws don't lower rates overlook socio-economic factors. Most countries with strict laws have low economic development, and poorer nations tend to have higher abortion rates. This important confounding factor is often ignored. As a relatively wealthy liberal democracy that banned abortion, our abortion rates were much lower. Abortion numbers can triple, and still Ireland refuses to acknowledge that the reluctant repealers were wrong, wrong, wrong. The Eighth was saving lives in the thousands. We collect statistics on where abortions happen in Ireland and under what part of the legislation, and virtually nothing else. We seem to have zero interest in the reasons why women have abortions – whether it is poverty, lack of support, or housing. Is that because we don't want to look too closely at anything that might undermine the idea that abortion is just another healthcare procedure? At some level, people know well that abortion is unlike any healthcare procedure. English singer Lily Allen recently sang a flippant parody of My Way about not knowing exactly how many abortions she had. It was probably five. Many pro-choice people were shocked. The comments on the BBC video of the podcast she hosts with Miquita Oliver, who has also had 'about five' abortions, showed the conflict people felt. Some pro-choice people felt that by saying the only justification needed for abortion is 'I don't want a f**king baby', she had handed ammunition to the anti-abortion advocates. [ Breda O'Brien: Ableist legislation shows lives of those with Down syndrome are less valuable Opens in new window ] Others disagreed, with comments such as: 'It's important to support any abortions for any reason. If you start putting restrictions on who can have them, how many they're allowed, and how they must act when they've had them ... well, you're not pro-choice.' I am not interested in dumping on Allen or Oliver. Allen has spoken about losing her virginity at 12, about a 19-year-old friend of her father's who bought her drinks and 'had sex with me' when she was 14, and about living through her teens to her 30s in a haze of drugs, alcohol and mental ill-health. (By the way, we have no idea how many women are coerced into abortion, even though domestic violence campaigners tell us it happens in Ireland, including one under 18-year-old who was locked in a room and forced to take abortion pills.) Allen and Oliver are not alone in joking about abortion. Irish comedian Katie Boyle has a comedy show about her experience of having an abortion aged 34 in the US, which caused the presenters of the Morning Show on Ireland AM to laugh. Nonetheless, most people still react with shock when abortion is treated as contraception – or a joke. It reminds me of debating in the past with people who were adamantly pro-choice, who visibly flinched when the number of babies with Down syndrome who are aborted was mentioned . Their humanitarian, pro-disability rights instincts conflicted with their other deeply held beliefs about the right to choose to end early human lives. The problem is that while bans and restrictions on abortion did decrease rates, those of us who consider ourselves pro-life depended on the legal ban while underestimating how the culture was changing. To keep abortion figures low in a well-off democracy, we needed to persuade people to build a woman-friendly society where pitting women's rights against the next generation's right to life became an unthinkable and completely outdated dilemma. The failure to do so really is no laughing matter.
Belfast Telegraph
29-06-2025
- Politics
- Belfast Telegraph
Government funding doubles for charity linked to UVF despite hoax bomb and Winkie Irvine's gunrunning
A charity linked to the UVF saw its funding from London and Dublin double just months after the terror gang's attack on Simon Coveney and Winkie Irvine's gunrunning arrest. Irish politician Coveney, then foreign affairs minister, was targeted in a hoax bomb alert during a peace conference in north Belfast in March 2022, while paramilitary godfather Irvine was caught with a bag filled with firearms and ammo in June of the same year.
Irish Independent
23-06-2025
- Business
- Irish Independent
The Irish Independent's View: New housing excuses sound remarkably similar to the old ones
The minister talked up returning vacant properties to the market and the potential for social housing and rental accommodation. Strategies will include streamlining the planning process, strategic use of land, funds for local authorities and more specific schemes. Construction levies and taxation will also be looked at. To understand the issue better from the inside out, and then to put measures in place that are practical and action-orientated, the minister was meeting with a wide variety of stakeholders. He also acknowledged that things will probably get worse before they get better. If this all sounds remarkably familiar, it's because this account of an interview by the housing minister is almost a decade old. This time nine years ago, the housing minister Simon Coveney was building up towards his big announcement of an action plan for housing. 'Rebuilding Ireland' was published in the summer of 2016 – complete with the commitment to end homelessness. Browne's overhaul of Rent Pressure Zones will arguably make the cost of rent worse Fast forward nine years and the current occupant of the Custom House, James Browne, is talking in strikingly similar terms about the imperative to increase supply. Browne's overhaul of Rent Pressure Zones will arguably make the cost of rent worse, initially, in order to increase the supply in the longer run, thereby making things better. But the minister doesn't appear to have the political wit to acknowledge there are immediate downsides to his plans. The impact of the lack of supply in the market is illustrated today in the Irish Independent/REA Average House Price Index. The survey shows asking prices still rising as buyers become desperate to get a home they can call their own. This summer, the minister will also launch an action plan for housing – the latest iteration of a running theme for a decade. Emerging from the ashes of the Celtic Tiger crash, successive governments of similar hues have failed to sufficiently increase the output of housing to anywhere near the levels required. A record 93,419 houses and apartments were built in 2006 – the highest rate in Europe. Nowadays we seem to be lucky if we break the 30,000 mark. Even the Government's bluff figure of 40,000 is well below that of a generation ago. Whatever bells-and-whistles plan is launched this time will doubtless try to suggest that the initiatives identified are new and therefore deserving of time to bed in and deliver results. It's a hard sell at this stage as the housing excuses wear thin for this Coalition. It is simply not credible to ask the public to ignore what has gone before simply because there is a new minister appointed in a newly formed government. Meet the new boss, he sounds remarkably similar to the old boss. Clear, coherent and credible policies will get a better reception than being told it will be different this time around.
Irish Times
12-06-2025
- Business
- Irish Times
This is a housing strategy written by Flann O'Brien
When they were introduced in 2016, rent pressure zones (RPZs) represented a courageous move by Simon Coveney and Fine Gael , a party that prefers to let the market determine what happens in housing . The first generation of RPZs limited rent increases to 4 per cent annually in 21 locations. These increases were subsequently reduced to a maximum of 2 per cent annually. RPZs now encompass 83 per cent of all tenancies. Owners of properties in a RPZ being rented for the first time, or after two years' vacancy, can set a market rent but are then restricted to the percentage limit. Outside RPZs, rents can be set every two years to the market rate. Have they worked? Although too often ignored, the rules have mostly been successful, maintaining some affordability and keeping people housed. Have they reduced the supply of new properties for rent? Anti-rent regulation proponents are convinced they have. But although apartment development has slowed down, there is no concrete evidence this is due to rent controls. Similar trends of funds leaving the rental sector have been observed in other countries where there are fewer rent controls, so it's plausible that different factors have convinced investors to punt their cash elsewhere. Ignoring recommendations of the Housing Commission, the Government is now to keep the 2 per cent rent increase maximum for existing tenants, which is welcome. For new-build rental housing, increases will be linked annually to consumer price inflation. After March 1st, 2026, landlords of new ' tenancy arrangements ' will be allowed reset the rent to market rates at the end of every six-year tenancy. The entire country will now be an RPZ, effectively negating the concept. READ MORE Conor Pope takes a closer look at the newly announced rent reforms. Video: Dan Dennison These changes are linked to increased security of tenure from March 2026, which will mean landlords with more than three properties cannot evict a tenant except in limited circumstances, and smaller landlords can evict at any time due to some 'particular hardship' (examples given in the Government's press release include somebody facing bankruptcy, marriage breakdown or homelessness, but the concept is almost certainly open to abuse); for use by an immediate family member; and for sale at the end of a six-year tenancy. There are several likely impacts of the Government's plans. The first is that there will be multiple categories of renters: those with an existing pre-June 2022 tenancy who are currently vulnerable to being legally evicted for any reason after six years; those in an existing post-2022 tenancy; and those in a new-build rental property. This will create more 'rent insiders' and 'rent outsiders', who are generally younger people . Critically, the ability of landlords to reset rents to the market at every new tenancy arrangement should alarm tenants. In the last six years, average new market rents nationally have increased by 41 per cent (to €1,680), and by 31 per cent in Dublin (to €2,177). Many thousands of renters who have to move each year (say, for work or study) will get hammered by this provision, while other tenants are more likely to stay put. Inflation-linked rent rises are attractive when rates are low and economies booming, but not when inflation is high and economies and employment may be at risk. The new system will be so complicated vulnerable renters such as the elderly and those whose first language is not English are far more likely to experience exploitation. Already a challenge, enforcement will increasingly be an issue. Will new rent rules help or hurt tenants - or fix the housing crisis? Listen | 21:19 The Government will bring its latest housing fix to Cabinet today when it presents new rules on rent levels for at boosting supply – by encouraging large institutional investors to build and small landlords to stay in the market – the plan primarily concerns rules around Rent Pressure Zones (RPZ).Presented by Bernice Harrison. Produced by Declan Conlon. These changes are all driven by one overarching aim: a desperate desire to attract the international investment the Government thinks it needs to increase rental supply and help resolve the housing crisis. If new rental supply is triggered by rent inflation, our rising rent problem is apparently going to be solved by allowing rents to rise. Flann O'Brien is now writing housing strategy. On Tuesday, Minister for Housing James Browne couldn't say when rents would fall on foot of these changes, hardly a ringing endorsement of his own policy. (Hint, Minister: no realistic amount of new supply will reverse the 100 per cent increase in rents in the last decade.) The Government also seems content to funnel a generation into long-term expensive renting, while simultaneously overseeing a commensurate decline in home ownership. As UCD professor Aidan Regan has said , for the first time ever this generation of young people may be poorer than its parents. These renters will be paying the pensions of comfortable, retired homeowning teachers in the US and elsewhere as they face years in housing – and wealth – oblivion. The Government is trying to expand a rental sector already twice as large as it should be, and for which there is little public desire compared to housing for sale. The Government is conveniently ignoring its own research which shows that 87 per cent of renters aged 25-49 want to be homeowners. Do we even need this international money? The Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland has suggested the establishment of a specific private savings fund devoted to housing to allow citizens to invest some of the €143 billion sitting in low interest-paying deposit accounts. So too has Fianna Fáil's own Barry Andrews MEP. Such a fund should be used to build affordable housing for sale, the housing we need. This is also financially efficient: build, sell, recycle the money, go again. You don't need gazillions of international euro to build housing for sale. Better on security of tenure than affordability, the proposals to reform Ireland's imperfect but functioning rent control feels very much like a Government in panic. This impression is not helped by a mismanaged launch, including patchy performances in TV interviews and a botched press release, which had to be reissued a few hours later. By incentivising the rental industry, the Government is anxious to see house completion numbers increase quickly after last year's politically arrogant broken promises – but at the expense of a generation of aspirational homeowners. Once again Government is trying to control a market it can't. Only two things are certain beyond death and taxes: the private sector will not solve our housing problems and, barring global mayhem, rents are not coming down any time soon. Dr Lorcan Sirr is senior lecturer in housing at the Technological University Dublin
