INCREASED INTEREST charges from extra borrowing dented profits at State company Bord na Móna this year, figures published by the group yesterday show.
Operating profits in the 12 months to March 31st, the group’s financial year, were level at €23 million. But profit before tax fell by around 30 per cent to €13 million from €19.5 million. Finance and corporate affairs director Michael Barry said this was down to a 150 per cent increase in interest payments to €10 million.
The company’s interest bill increased because it borrowed $200 million in the US last year through a bond sale to a number of pension funds. It will use the cash to fund its various development plants.
Bord na Móna’s operations span managing and harnessing the Republic’s peat lands, energy, recycling, fuels and horticulture.
On Thursday, the company will present a €500 million plan to Dublin City Council to bring excess water from the Shannon to the midlands and east.
The plan, on which the company and consultants RPS and Veolia Water, have been working, involves bringing water from the Shannon basin, from a point to the north of Lough Derg, to a reservoir in Garryhinch, west of Portarlington, from where it will be pumped eastwards.
The water will supply up to nine counties in the east and midlands, including Dublin, Kildare, Meath, Westmeath and Wicklow, with water.
The project will ultimately be paid for by water charges, which Bord na Móna chief executive Gabriel D’Arcy said yesterday were inevitable. “It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when,” he said.
Taking excess water will help ease the risk of flooding in the Shannon basin, although it will not be sufficient to cope with anything like the levels of flooding seen there last November.
The average flow rate in the Shannon is 180 cubic metres of water a second. This plan would take the equivalent of four cubic metres a second, around 2.5 per cent of the river’s water, and divert it east, where ultimately it would end up flowing into the Irish Sea, rather than into the Atlantic.
Bord na Móna said yesterday that water supplies are increasingly becoming an issue for business. There is pressure on the resource in the eastern half of the country, where many big, and strategically important, employers are based.
Dublin City Council was the local authority chosen to oversee the plan to bring water from Shannon to the midlands and east, but the city and county are just part of the region that will benefit.
After next Thursday, Bord na Móna is likely to seek planning permission for the project under the strategic infrastructure system, which means the proposals will go straight to An Bord Pleanála.
Between planning and construction, the project could take up to 10 years to complete.
An improvement in investment markets helped Bord na Móna cut its pension deficit to €20 million from €45 million in 2009. The company is also close to agreeing new terms for the pension scheme to which 1,700 of its staff subscribe.
Sales dipped 4 per cent in the financial year to €384 million from €400 million in 2009.
