This week on Miriam Meets..... Miriam O'Callaghan interviews Patrick Coveney, CEO Greencore and his younger brother Simon Coveney, TD, Fine Gael front bench spokesperson on Communications, Energy and Natural Resources.In the course of a candid interview, the brothers recall their childhood in Cork and their education at Clongowes Wood as boarders. They explain the impact of untimely death of their father, the late Hugh Coveney T.D., on their lives.
Patrick discusses the recent fraud uncovered in one of Greencore's Scottish operations. Simon reveals his ambition to lead Fine Gael in the future.
In light of recent reported comments by Simon on Enda Kenny's leadership, Miriam asked if Simon supported Enda Kenny:
I thought that the response to my recent comments ( about Enda Kenny's leadership of Fine Gael) was extraordinary because I merely said what Enda said himself, which was that he needed to up his game and he intended doing just that.
Miriam asked Simon if he would like to be a leader of Fine Gael:
I am very ambitious so the straight answer is yes, someday. But I am personally very loyal to Enda and he knows that. I think he will be the next Taoiseach and I want to try to help him in any way I can to get there.
Simon explains the challenges he faced as a young teenager:
Patrick was the success story of the family from a very early stage. He was the straight A student, the debater, the future politician. People assume I had that kind of background. The reality was I had a speech impediment. I had a stutter. Literally until I was 15 or 16 year of age, I could not string two or three sentences together. I remember breaking pencils under the desk in frustration when trying to read as Gaeilge in Irish class.
But you learn to cope with these things. I subconsciously think two or three sentences ahead and I will subconsciously choose a vocabulary that allows the speech to flow.
I also went off the rails in secondary school. It's not something I talk about very often.
In Transition Year, Simon was expelled from Clongowes Wood boarding school.
There were two incidents. I got suspended for drinking . About a month later, we organised a beach party in Sutton, County Dublin. We ran away from school to go to the party. Nobody came and we ended up sleeping literally in a church doorway. We were frozen. We stayed there until six o'clock in the morning when the priest arrived and we asked if there was any chance we could sit next to a heater in the church until we warmed up.
When we got back to school, there were repercussions.
I was a normal fifteen or sixteen year old. I was hanging around in a pair of doc Martens and parka, thinking I was cool.
But Patrick contends that the untimely death of their father, Hugh Coveney, TD on 14 March 1998 changed all the children, especially Simon.
It would be my very strong contention that the event of my father passing away had powerful positive outcomes. It was a catalyst for all my siblings to really grow up. With Simon it was like a night and day change.... he became a real man overnight.
Simon acknowledges this. -It was a real water shed in my life.
Commenting on the uncovering of fraud in one of Greencore's Scottish operations, and subsequent queries over his position as CEO, Patrick said:
It was part of my job to discover the fraud earlier - I had been CFO. So people ask are you responsible for it and my answer is I was. But I am also the best person equipped to fix this. We have done a pretty nice job in recovering from it.
I made no attempt to deflect accountability for it - I was the person responsible. The worse thing I could have done was to pass the problem on to other people.