‘Business is about nothing more and nothing less than relationships’

This year’s Sustainability Champion category winner at the IMAGE PwC Businesswoman of the Year Awards and Chief Impact Officer and Board Director for Simply Blue Energy Ireland talks off-shore wind potential; shares the challenges of moving from research to business; and her late awakening to feminism.

Sailing is still a huge part of her life and she’s fresh from a sailing trip with her musician husband Ken and their children when I speak with her. “I had, you could say, a relatively late awakening to feminism. I have a really deep appreciation now of needing to be very sensitive to being the only woman in the room and doing everything I can to call it out.

“I was due to go on a business trip the following morning, on the Saturday, to Tokyo and I was focused on that. I felt that if you were really going to win something like this, that you’d have had a heads up. So , I assumed that I hadn’t won. “Those fast followers may quickly usurp Europe’s leadership position if Europe doesn’t manage to move a lot of bureaucratic red tape out of the way and accelerate towards the kind of solutions we need to see at a large scale for climate change.”Surprisingly, for an island, Ireland doesn’t hold a candle to Europe in the offshore wind energy stakes.

“Ireland is a tiny island nation, but it was characterised really, with a lot of sea blindness. We looked inland – we’ve become really successful at building clusters in biomedical devices, ICT, and pharmaceuticals. The next big cluster we need to develop is our main energy cluster, and to wake up and start turning now towards the sea.”She cites Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a trigger point to shake Ireland’s need for energy independence.

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