€1.5m Barleystone plant to be operational by year end

A €1.5 million addition to the existing Barleystone Paving manufacturing facility near Kingscourt, which has the potential to create up to 10 new jobs for the area, should be completed before the end of the year and fully operational by early 2017.

Those jobs are in addition to a further 60 new jobs already filled across the group’s local facilities in the past year.
It follows the granting of permission by Cavan County Council to the O’Reilly Concrete Group, Ireland’s largest manufacturer of precast concrete products, for the construction of the new facility at the 15-acre site in east Cavan.
The new factory is being built adjacent to the existing plant and three existing batching plants on the site, two of which will feed the new factory with the third providing the block mix for the company’s trademark flags.
“We will be feeding that new factory from the two batching plants. That factory, we hope, will be producing flags by the end of December and into full production by the new year,” says O’Reilly group sales director, Paddy Hagan, who explains that of the full investment, one third will be spent in kitting out the plant for production.
“It will be equipped with state-of-the-art German block making machinery, so it is fairly labour efficient. But there will certainly be some employment created in it in the long run. There will probably be up to 10 on day and night shifts and possibly including a sales rep. It’s 10 local jobs, which is to be welcomed,” Mr Hagan told The Anglo-Celt.
It’s not the only major investment by the company across its three businesses - O’Reilly Concrete, O’Reilly Oakstown Ltd and Barleystone Paving Ltd - after they spend in the region of €200,000 employing Monaghan-based Combilift to design and build a unique precast Straddle Carrier to coincide with the expansion of their plant at Ballyhoe near Carrickmacross.
Furthermore, O’Reilly’s have also invested in taking over the former Flynn’s Precast site outside Belturbet, where they now employ up to 20 people.
Mr Hagan says: “All told we have about 200 on the books at the minute, that’s including some summer staff as well but that’s up from about 130 or 140 this time last year. We’ve probably taken on about 60 workers over the past year.”

'Struggle’ for engineers
He is not surprised to see a sizeable jump in CAO applications for construction related courses following this year’s Leaving Certificate.
“We have a very strong engineering office here, with 15 between civil, construction and environmental engineers. I think we’d struggle if we had to go out and recruit tomorrow. We’ve taken on four engineers this year. They are graduates, we’ve taken on two as well, but engineers are scarce. That’s across the board,” said Mr Hagan.

Market growth
The investment of late by O’Reilly Group is spurred by significant growth, especially in the UK market, and the businesses have ramped up production capacity accordingly to meet demand. At present, just over a third of what the company produces is exported to the UK.
But, while the shadow of Brexit looms, the company continues to look to the Irish market as a source of confident recovery, especially where high-quality precast is in high demand particularly with regard the construction of new schools.
“There are those people who believe Brexit won’t happen for two or three years but for a lot of companies, ourselves included, the impact has been felt already. The drop in the currency rate can have a big impact. We had a situation where last September we were looking at a Sterling value of 69.3c, now it’s close to 87c. That’s a huge swing for a company to try and deal with.
“At the moment, we do precast for a lot of rapid school projects, including the new school in Kingscourt, which is set to start in about a month’s time. That will be a proud moment for the company, it’s on our doorstep and it’s been a long time coming for the town.It’s quite a large impressive project and we’re delighted to be involved in that. We are involved in a lot of precast for new schools around the country, thankfully funding has been made available for projects like that and long may it continue,” says Mr Hagan.