Obituaries

Malachy McCloskey obituary: Boyne Valley Foods founder with a love of the arts

Entrepreneur from Drogheda was generous donor to national museum and library

In 2017, Malachy McCloskey was awarded an honorary MBE by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth for services to UK-Irish trade

Sat Jan 4 2020 - 05:00

Malachy McCloskey
Born: June 12th, 1939
Died: December 7th, 2019

Malachy McCloskey, who has died aged 80, combined a remarkable career in business with equally remarkable commitments to the arts and especially to his home town of Drogheda, Co Louth. He was born there in 1939, the son of Paddy McCloskey, a regional transport manager for what in 1944 became CIÉ. His father also ran a greengrocer’s shop, and his mother Vera, nee Murphy, started McCloskey’s bakery in the town.

After boarding school at St Patrick’s College, Armagh, aged just 17, McCloskey went straight to work in the greengrocer’s, which also sold locally-sourced honey.

Malachy ... was not, in my view, one for doing things for the kudos; he had his heart in the right place

The young man soon realised that he could make money by selling excess honey to other outlets around the town. The business, branded as Boyne Valley Honey, grew rapidly in the 1960s, so that by the end of the decade he had opened a production facility just outside Drogheda at Mell, selling all over the State and even exporting to Britain and Northern Ireland.

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The business, known today as Boyne Valley Foods, thereafter rapidly diversified into the production, at three locations in Drogheda, of consumer products which today include some of the best-known brands in Ireland, including McDonnell’s sauces, Chivers jams (now manufactured in the UK), Erin Foods and the Killeen range of cleaning products.

The latter product range’s story says a lot about McCloskey’s commitment to his native place. Former Labour TD and government minister, Ruairí Quinn, told The Irish Times that when he was minister for labour in the 1980s, he was approached by Louth Labour Party TD, Michael Bell, to see if he could do anything about the very bad unemployment problem in Drogheda. On a trip to the town, Quinn met McCloskey.

“He [McCloskey] said to me ‘what can I do to help?’, and I answered ‘well, Drogheda is an old industrial town; it needs fairly straightforward employment,’ to which he answered ‘is that a challenge?’ and I said to him ‘well, if you want to take it that way, yes, I suppose it is’.”

McCloskey then approached relevant government agencies, asking them about what imported products could be easily replaced by native-produced ones, and got the answer “recycled plastics”. Thus, in the townland of Killeen outside Drogheda, McCloskey opened a factory making the eponymous cleaning products from recycled materials which flourishes to this day.

Between their various enterprises, the McCloskey family’s businesses now employ about 200 people in Drogheda, and exports to more than 40 countries worldwide.

Business success gave McCloskey the resources to indulge his passion for the arts, and two important national institutions, the National Museum and the National Library, were significant beneficiaries of this philanthropy. McCloskey paid for the printing costs of Treasures of the National Museum of Ireland, and Treasures of the National Library of Ireland, books published in association with Gill and Macmillan. He also paid for a pocket-sized version of renowned archaeologist Peter Harbison’s three-volume Field Guide to the High Crosses of Ireland. Dr Pat Wallace, former director of the National Museum, said the museum book “made a fortune” for the institution, with sales running into several thousands.

Warehouse

Wallace also revealed that McCloskey had brought him up to Boyne Valley Foods’ high-technology warehouse, one of the largest such facilities in Ireland, to help the museum staff with a major problem, how to adequately store, and safely retrieve for exhibition, its stock of artefacts.

“It was a phenomenal eye-opener for us. We spent hours in the fully mechanised warehouse, and learned about the limits of how you can arrange storage.”

McCloskey was equally generous with Harbison’s Treasures of the Boyne Valley, something for which Harbison was deeply grateful, saying that “Malachy ... was not, in my view, one for doing things for the kudos; he had his heart in the right place, especially in Drogheda, and put his money into the right things.”

Other books sponsored by McCloskey included a facsimile of the Book of Kells, which he presented as a prize for a children’s nationwide art competition in the 1980s, and two books about the Battle of the Boyne, one of them, Drummer Boy’s Story, by Brenda Maguire, about the battle as seen through the eyes of a boy soldier, the other a factual historical account by the historian Harman Murtagh, of the Athlone Institute of Technology.

Gregarious and outgoing, McCloskey used his pronounced gift for communication to reach out to other Irish people of different traditions from his. He hosted the East Belfast Rotary Club in his home in Drogheda during his presidency of the Co Louth town’s rotary club during the peace process. In 2017, McCloskey was awarded an honorary MBE by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth for services to UK-Irish trade.

McCloskey loved collecting visual art, rare varieties of roses and tulips, and restoring classic Victorian glasshouses, imported in boxes from England and reassembled in Drogheda, and restoring historic buildings both in Drogheda and Co Cavan, for which he received awards from An Taisce. He loved exotic foreign travel, bringing his family to the High Arctic, South America and India as educational experiences, during the latter of which he successfully arranged to meet the Dalai Lama.

Malachy McCloskey was married to Anne, nee Greene, who worked in her family’s antique shop in Drogheda before marriage. Anne survives him with their six sons, Edward, John, Mark, Peter, Colm and Ivan. He was predeceased by his brother Paddy and sister Fidelma, and is survived also by a sister, Sr Colette of the Presentation Order, and his brother, Phelim.

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