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\u2018Over a billion eyeballs will be on the parade\u2019: St Patrick\u2019s festival CEO Richard Tierney<\/p>\nJohn Kelly\u2019s grandfather was a cooper in the Guinness brewery before leaving for Liverpool in the early 1930s \u201cwhen the work got tight\u201d, though his great-grandfather never grew to accept that a new generation of Kellys would grow up \u201coverseas\u201d.<\/p>\n
Once there, Kelly\u2019s grandfather began working in Cains Brewery on the Docks Road in Liverpool. His first child, also called John, born in 1931, started primary school in Sylvester Street in Everton.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy great-grandfather kept coming over and taking my father back to Ireland to work on the farm in Skerries, because he didn\u2019t want, as he put it, the eldest Kelly boy growing up overseas,\u201d says John Kelly, now the chief executive of Suir Engineering.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019d collect my father from school and take him a few hundred yards to the terminal and straight on to the ferry and over to Ireland before my grandfather even knew anything about it,\u201d Kelly tells The Irish Times.<\/p>\n
In the beginning, the Liverpool Kellys lived in Norris Green in the east of Liverpool, \u201ca real hard-working, working-class area in Liverpool, a very Catholic working-class area\u201d, he tells The Irish Times.<\/p>\n
His father became the first in the family to own their own home when he moved out to Maghull, \u201cfrom where on a clear day, we could see Aintree Racecourse if we stood on the hill\u201d.<\/p>\n
Back then, Maghull was an emerging \u201cnew town\u201d, where the Catholics went to the Maricourt convent and school and nearly everyone else went to the Church of England school \u201cthat backed on to our house\u201d.<\/p>\n
Throughout, the Liverpool Kellys returned to Ireland, \u201chome\u201d, in the words always of his father, who later served in the British Army, though his mother\u2019s Irish connections were a further generation back.<\/p>\n
The blood links with Ireland have helped Kelly during a career that brought him to the Dublin-based Mercury Engineering in the early 2010s: \u201cBeing from Liverpool, I probably wasn\u2019t quite viewed the same as I would be if I was coming from elsewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n
The view the Irish take of the British, he has found, depends on \u201chow far north they\u2019re from, and whether they\u2019re from an Irish stronghold such as Liverpool or Manchester, or somewhere with an affinity with Ireland\u201d.<\/p>\n
Today, Kelly leads Suir Engineering, with 1,600 employees, which offers mechanical, electrical, instrumentation and high-voltage engineering services to companies not just in Ireland, but the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, Finland and Germany, too.<\/p>\n
Sometimes. he\u2019d recruit hurlers and train them to be electricians because they were good hurlers.<\/p>\n
Headquartered in Waterford, Suir began life in Mooncoin, Co Kilkenny under its now deceased founder, Noel Doyle, who mixed a passion for business with an even-stronger passion for hurling.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes. he\u2019d recruit hurlers and train them to be electricians because they were good hurlers,\u201d says Kelly, with a smile. \u201cHe even had the canteen roaring away in the afternoon so they could go straight to training from work.\u201d<\/p>\n
Today, Suir Engineering is owned by private equity group, Duke Street, which bought it from EDF Energy in 2023 \u2013 following a tumultuous decade when Suir \u2013 though profitable \u2013 had to be extracted from the collapse of its then owner, Royal Imtech.<\/p>\n
Usually, Duke Street keeps companies for three to five years before selling them, but \u201cthey do have businesses within the portfolio that they\u2019ve held for 10, 11, 12 years and they do like the business.<\/p>\n
\u201cI really like working with private equity, because as long as you do what you say you\u2019re going to do, you\u2019re fine. It\u2019s all about performance. If you\u2019re performing then, you\u2019ve no problems at all with them,\u201d Kelly tells The Irish Times.<\/p>\n
Today, Suir has a few key pillars to its business, he says \u2013 data centres, energy, including electricity grids and renewable, life sciences and pharmaceuticals, and food and beverage manufacturing.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve stopped trying to chase everything and focus on what we are best at doing,\u201d he goes, adding that Suir has worked with every one of the 10 biggest pharmaceutical firms based in Ireland.<\/p>\n
\u2018Over a billion eyeballs will be on the parade\u2019: St Patrick\u2019s festival CEO Richard Tierney<\/p>\n
\u201cWe do upgrades works to grids. We build big substations. We connect to the grids for large users such as data centres and pharmaceutical plants. We connect developers to the grid to build power stations and solar farms and wind farms.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat gives the opportunity to work overseas with them because they like to work with people who they know and trust to deliver, especially when they\u2019re going into new territory, as well,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Three years ago when Kelly took over from Michael Kennedy as chief executive, 70 per cent of Suir\u2019s work was in Ireland, mostly for a Grade A list of multinationals and major Irish-owned firms.<\/p>\n
Today, the split is 50\/50, with growth coming in the United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark, Sweden: \u201cNow, we\u2019re also in Austria as well and we\u2019re likely to work in Finland,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
The shift from 70\/30 to 50\/50 figures holds lessons. Major pharmaceutical investments in Ireland are not currently happening, and unlikely to do so for the next few years, partly because of the presence of Donald Trump in the White House.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey don\u2019t want to be seen to be putting two billion into Ireland to build a new plant in Grange Castle, or wherever, they don\u2019t want to be invested in large capital projects with such a political backdrop.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, the investment is smaller scale \u2013 to refurbish plants and to eke out the life of the plant and to get more out of it. They\u2019re sweating assets at the moment, rather than big capex investments,\u201d he goes on.<\/p>\n
Consequently, Suir has now moved some of its highly-skilled life sciences people abroad for the first time: \u201cWe\u2019re working in Germany with one of our customers that we would normally work with back here, but not on a major scale.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, there are others who would be willing to spend in Ireland, such as data centres and renewable developers, but are not because of electricity grid shortages \u2013 ones that are being worked on, but which will take up to five years to solve.<\/p>\n
But there\u2019s no avoiding that the next three years are going to be fairly barren for data centres in Ireland. There\u2019ll be a few built, but that\u2019s it.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor the next three years to five years, at least three years, there\u2019s definitely more investment overseas than in Ireland because of the restrictions with power,\u201d Kelly declares.<\/p>\n
Recent changes should spur some construction of data centres with energy located on site, but \u201cthe grid upgrade works has got to move an awful long way, I think, before we\u2019ll see large-scale development again like we\u2019ve seen elsewhere\u201d.<\/p>\n
Everything about data centres spurs claim and counterclaim, especially numbers that show that a quarter of the current electricity supply is consumed by the ones already in existence, and that the figure will go up to 30 per cent.<\/p>\n
For Kelly, such numbers illustrate past failures and past successes. Firstly, Ireland was at the forefront of a technological wave that came into the country. Secondly, the gird never grew in size as it should have done.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a worry, but I\u2019m hopeful that that can be corrected eventually. But there\u2019s no avoiding that the next three years are going to be fairly barren for data centres in Ireland. There\u2019ll be a few built, but that\u2019s it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
![\"circa](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/I57KE4YVMJEGLBXLT5Y3OUO6HY.jpg\")
circa 1930: Scene of the dockside in Liverpool with vessels alongside. (Photo by Hulton Archive\/Getty Images) <\/p>\n