Late site starts hit McInerney's H1 profits - House builder McInerney Holdings has posted half year results to the end of June and they show that group turnover increased 8.2% to €171.2m in the first six months of this year compared to last year. Pre-tax profits are down from €16.5m to €11m and earnings per share were 27.68 cent, compared to almost 44 cent to June last year. The negative figures are due to a change in the site start timings for new building projects.
Managing director of McInerney Holdings, Barry O'Connor, says the company's operations are back-loaded with not as many house starts in the first half of the year compared to the second. However, the company is on track for its full year target figures of over 1,100 new housing units in Ireland and 700 in the UK. He says that the housing market here continues to remain strong and is not worried by the 'merchants of doom' predicting that it is about to experience a sudden slow down. He says that they have been predicting this for years and he does not see it happening any time soon. He says that nationwide house completions will continue to run at a level of about 75,000 units in the near term.
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Greenstar in new landfill energy initiative - NTR is routinely in the news because of its toll roads subsidiary, but another of its subsidiaries is in the news this morning. Waste management company Greenstar has announced that it will open a gas to energy facility at the landfill it operates in Co Kildare. The idea is to convert landfill gas into energy for distribution through the National Grid and its the first time the country has had such a project on a commercial basis. Director of Business Development at Greenstar, John Mullins, says that the project is a joint venture with a Germany company and will generate enough electricity to power a town the size of Naas. The company is planning to build a total of six such plants, with an investment of €15m, and hope to generate 15 megawatts of power by 2010.
The landfill site is engineered in such a way to produce harvestable gas - methane - that can then be turned into energy. It will be sold to Airtricity who will then fed it into the National Grid and also sell it on to small and medium sized enterprises. Mr Mullins also said that Greenstar is looking into other bio-energy and bio-fuel projects.
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Doyle stepping down from Indo's top job - The country's biggest selling daily newspaper, the Irish Independent, has a new editor following the retirement yesterday of Vinnie Doyle after 24 years in charge. Former Evening Herald editor Gerry O'Regan is taking over the top job. In recent years, Mr Doyle presided over the launch of the compact edition of the Irish Independent and is staying on in an advisory capacity with the title. Mr Doyle says the key to a successful editor is to earn some respect from the editing and reporting desks by being able to do anything that they are asked to do. He says the success of the Independent is down to its relentless competitive drive and its constant quest to get the best story. He says one of the paper's success stories was its stand on the divorce referendum. The paper took a stand on the issue which flew in the face of tradition - a move for which it attracted a lot of criticism. But Mr Doyle says the paper was catering for a generation on the way up, and they called it right.
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New Ipod too fragile - Problems with the new smaller version of the Apple Ipod are being reported. The new almost wafer thin device is reportedly attracting complaints to a website specially set up to collate complaints about the new Ipod, which is the thickness of five credit cards. Most of the complaints say the new device is too fragile. In particular, there are concerns that the LCD screen suffers from either cracking, scratching or inexplicable failure.
