Siobhán Talbot, managing director of Glanbia, has been selected as Business Person of the Year in the inaugural Irish Times Business Awards.

Talbot was one of 11 winners of the newspaper's Business Person of the Month Awards which were launched in May 2017 in partnership with KPMG.

Talbot's award citation referenced spinning off Glanbia’s Irish dairy and agribusiness operation into Glanbia Ireland, whose majority shareholder is the Glanbia Co-operative Society. A previous attempt to sell the business to the Co-Op failed in 2010.

Ireland’s largest indigenous company CRH was named Company of the Year .

The Top 1,000 Distinguished Leader in Business Award went to Mark FitzGerald, chairman of estate agent Sherry FitzGerald (pictured below on left).  He retired last year after more than 40 years in the business, 35 of them as chief executive of the estate agent.

In Association with

Other awards went to Newry sports technology group Statsports Technologies, which won Deal of the Year award for its €1.1 billion deal with the official governing body of soccer in the US, and AIB's Mark Bourke, who was named Chief Financial Officer of the Year.  Bourke was a key player in AIB’s return to stock markets in Dublin and London, the largest IPO in Europe in 2017.

Pix: Conor McCabe