John talks about his passion for Mullingar as he takes over the reins at Mullingar Chamber

New president talks about his passion for Mullingar as he takes over the reins of the Chamber

Olga Aughey

Building a broader retail membership and marketing the town better are two of the key objectives the newly elected president of the Mullingar Chamber of Commerce has in his sights.

“Mullingar Chamber tries to work with as many big companies as we can to support a robust Chamber, to drive the agenda that Mullingar is a positive place to live and to work," says John Geoghegan, who in August took over the reins from outgoing president Tom Hyland.

Despite it being one of the most difficult years to take on such a job, John says the objective is to improve on the Chamber's existing initiatives such as the Purple Flag, Mullingar.ie website and Voucher scheme, as well as changing the national perspective on how Mullingar is seen as a town nationally.

With a background in construction and property management, John, who started up his own company Landcorp Private in 2017, has great belief in Westmeath's capital town:

“When you do out a business plan for Mullingar, there’s a lot of positives here in terms of schools, infrastructure, and sports facilities, the GAA, rugby club, golf club, tennis club - you’ve all these things going on.

“There’s great value for money in terms of housing here. A three-bed semi costs €250,000 in Mullingar, as opposed to €375-400,000 in the likes of Maynooth.

“Mullingar is a super town, but we just think it could be marketed better going forward. Like for instance, if you're on the M50 from Dublin, there's signposts for Westport, Sligo, everywhere but there's none for Mullingar, except at Coralstown on the N4.

“I often go to meetings in Dublin and people ask you, 'Gee, how long did it take you to get up here', and I say 50 minutes - they think we're in Roscommon, like you know. So we're trying to promote the town in terms of how people perceive it and where it is, and a big part of that is the employers."

John is hopeful that the IDA development of Marlinstown Park will soon bear fruit: "Ken Whitelaw, a local Mullingar man who is the IDA's regional manager for the Midlands, has been extremely helpful. My understanding is that now, the IDA is strategically looking at Mullingar as a destination and there's a lot of potential in Mullingar to develop something at Marlinstown."

Speaking of his own company, Landcorp Private which manages assets for private investors based in the town, John says:

"The investors I work with have a lot of property in Mullingar, and they'd probably be the largest single owner of assets in the town. We're always managing our interests in the town as best we can.

"It's a passion I would have to see the town improve over the next ten years. The population of Mullingar over the last 40 years has doubled twice, and now at 20,000 the town is in a state of flux whereby regional and national policy in planning is really harming the potential of Mullingar.

"If you look at the spatial strategy recently signed off on by government, Mullingar can really only grow by an extra three to four thousand people in the next decade, which is incredible when you consider that's only 1% per annum growth rate, in a country that was growing 6-7% before Covid.

"So Mullingar is in a very difficult position, it's hamstrung with national planning policy and I would be passionate about trying to overturn that and fight it because I think the town has great potential for more growth.

"If you look at the infrastructure in the town, the council have spent maybe a hundred million euros building the C-link Road, upgrading the sewers and underground infrastructure, so infrastructurally speaking, we have the potential for an extra 20,000 people in the town but we only have permission for 3,000. So we're in a bind. It horrified me that the national planning strategy is in this situation and I'm hoping that in the future we can drive on the town.”

Working together

“One of my objectives as president of the Chamber would be to try and get groups to work together. The goal is the same goal we all have, it’s just to communicate it," he continues.

"We have a good working relationship with the Council, their door is open and they do welcome us to come in and present them with suggestions and ideas, and we've agreed to to work as one cohesive voice for as many groups as possible."

One of the main issues the Chamber will be trying to bring logic and reason to, eliminating the rhetoric, is the traffic problems that have plagued the town centre since the street enhancement.

Meeting with the consultants who designed the new traffic light system this week, John says the Chamber has been actively promoting a revision of the roundabout at McDonalds.

"And speaking to a number of taxi drivers who know the town better than anyone, they say there's only two exits to the south of Mullingar, and both are beyond the Bank of Ireland. So you have to go to the end of the town to get out of town, and then you’re coming through Blackhall, which was never designed as a road in the first place.

“To be fair to the council, the street enhancement was an ambitious project to take on, and when it doesn’t work out perfectly there’s always going to be a backlash from the town’s stakeholders.

“But it's not working, and with the schools back, and if the traffic grinds to a halt at Christmastime, it will be very embarrassing. So this needs to be solved once and for all," he states.

Retail

Another objective John has set his sights on is building on the retail base within the Chamber.

“The stronger the Chamber is, the stronger the voice we will have. The Chamber has 140 members, and we estimate they have around 1,000 employees. The more members we have, the stronger we are in front of the Council. So we're actively seeking members, our door is wide open for anyone to join.

“We're repositioning the value for retailers because we don’t have a lot of retail members and they’re in a very difficult spot this year. We've brought in a new board, and set up a retail committee, with Dec Murray of Dalys and The Blizzards, and Robert Galvin, and their job is to devise a membership stratum for retailers.”

Background

“My spare time is spent on a number of things, the Chamber is obviously a big part of it, I love playing golf, and I like socialising, going out for a few pints and meeting people, and I love travel," says John who is married to wife Gillian.

From Delvin originally, John and his family to Mullingar in 1993, and after school John went to DIT Bolton Street, where he studied a degree in Property Economics.

Joining Arthur Anderson in Dublin in 2001, he then returned to Mullingar to work for Aidan Egan Snr in auctioneering.

"Aidan was a great help to me as a young fella, he taught me an awful lot about commercial auctioneering and property in Mullingar and the region. And then in 2003 I moved to Hungary to Budapest, with an Irish company called Manolia Homes, who back then were the biggest housebuilders in Ireland.

"We were researching and developing sites in eastern Europe. Hungary proved a very difficult market and we couldn't get an opportunity to suit us, so I moved to Warsaw in Poland in 2004, and we acquired an old power station in the middle of the city, on 10 acres of land.

And we got planning on it for 300 apartments, and 400 underground parking spaces, and a retail centre. We sold all the apartments thank God, and then the rest of the site in 2011 and in that year, the middle of the recession.

"I came back here in 2011 and there was nothing going on here. The property sector was completely dead, so I joined Nama and I worked with NAMA for a year and a half as an asset recovery manager, and I ran one of their biggest portfolios which was the Liam Carroll receivership."

Leaving NAMA in 2013, John joined the family run Bennett Construction, with substantial property interests across the country, and a large concentration of assets in Mullingar, where he worked as development director for seven years.

In 2017 John left Bennett Construction to set up his own company called Landcorp Private, a company that manages assets for private investors based in the town.

Initiatives

He also aims to build on the Chamber's existing initiatives, including the Mullingar.ie website which promotes the town and its events; as well as the Purple Flag, the safe night-time economy initiative; and of course the Mullingar Voucher Scheme.

“We sold €200,000 last year in vouchers. People come in and they buy the vouchers at Christmas time and give them to their friends and family, and then they in turn come in January spend them locally in Mullingar.

"We give the money back to the shops, so it keeps that €200,000 in the town. We estimate that it's worth 400,000 in terms of 'churn of capital'. It’s all part of our agreement with Westmeath County Council.”

It also aims to attract people into the town, such as the 1,000 visitors who attended the Careers Expo in the National Science Park last year.

“The National Science Park was an incredible investment in the town on behalf of Gary Moore of Steripack. He invested millions of euro in the old Tobacco Factory on the Dublin Road, developing clean rooms and R&D facilities. Gary would be a very big supporter of the Chamber in terms of representing Mullingar and marketing the town as a destination.”

"It's a very tough year, there's no question about that, but Mullingar Chamber is very lucky in a way because one of the things we did over the years is promote a number of events.

One of those was the National Life Science Expo in the Park Hotel, it was here for three or four years and it would have had around 1,000 visitors in a day, and it was a good revenue producer for the Chamber and without the support of Tom Hyland and Gary Moore back then, that wouldn't have happened. And Mullingar Chamber has been fortunate in a way that all of that hard work has paid off in some way so that the Chamber is reasonably well set up for this year.

"The next 12 months I think we'll be ok if we retain the support of the Council and local businesses, but certainly in terms of retail and street and the knock-on effect of Covid you can see there is going to be major issues out there. And 2021 is going to be a huge challenge for the whole country."