In terms women at the very top of the corporate food chain, Ireland was performing relatively well against the rest of Europe last year. Research by headhunters Heidrick & Struggles showed 14% of publicly-listed Irish companies had female CEOs, compared to the European average of 6%.

Since then, however, Francesca McDonagh has left Bank of Ireland to become group COO at Credit Suisse, meaning there are just two female CEOs at ISEQ 20 firms. This year has also seen former Eir CEO Carolan Lennon move to Salesforce Ireland and Anne O’Leary leave the top job at Vodafone Ireland for a sales VP role at Meta Ireland.

There have been some notable appointments in the multinational sector, softening the blow of those losses, ensuring the ranks of women leading major companies haven’t been thinned out. Here are the top 10 female CEOs in Ireland in alphabetical order.

Natasha Adams – CEO, Tesco Ireland

For a couple of months over the summer, Tesco Ireland became Ireland’s leading grocery retailer in terms of market share, a boon to new CEO Natasha Adams.

Adams replaced Kari Daniels as head of the British supermarket chain’s Irish operation in April after serving as the group’s chief people officer, and the Kerry native moved back to Ireland to take on the role.

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The company is now in the process of integrating nine stores in Co Galway into its network following its acquisition of Joyce’s Supermarkets. Tesco Ireland recorded sales of £2.5bn in 2021-22, while Tesco Group reported turnover of £61.3bn and adjusted operating profit of £2.8bn.

Lorna Conn – CEO, Cpl Group

Lorna Conn was appointed CEO of Cpl in January, having joined the recruitment group as CFO in 2017 and becoming deputy CEO in April last year. 

She replaced co-founder Anne Heraty at the head of the company, which was acquired by Japanese firm Outsourcing Inc in January 2021 for €318m. Outsourcing reported revenues of ¥569bn (€3.9bn) and profit of ¥2.2bn (€15m) for its latest financial year.

Conn graduated in commerce from UCD and earned a Masters in accounting from the Michael Smurfit Business School before training at Deloitte. Cpl employs around 15,000 people internationally.

Dee Forbes – Director-General, RTÉ

Dee Forbes has led the national broadcaster at a time of significant cuts, selling off a huge tract of land at the Montrose campus for €107.5m in 2017 and announcing plans to reduce costs by €60m two years later. 

RTÉ reported revenue of €344.4m and a net surplus of €2.4m last year following deficits in 2018 and 2019. She repeatedly called for reform of the “utterly broken” licence fee system, with the state-owned company estimating revenue loss of €65m per year in unpaid fees.

The Cork native studied history and politics at UCD before moving to the UK to work in advertising agency Young and Rubicam. She served as managing director of Discovery in northern Europe before joining RTÉ, and also worked at Turner Broadcasting.

Adaire Fox-Martin – head of Google in Ireland

Adaire Fox-Martin was appointed head of Google in Ireland this year, barely six months after she joined the tech giant as EMEA cloud president with responsibility for leading the company’s Cloud Sales organisation for the region.

Prior to joining Google Ireland, Fox-Martin held executive roles at SAP and Oracle, but she started her career as a teacher before pivoting to technology, a sector she has now worked in for more than two decades.

Google parent Alphabet made a profit of $76bn from revenues of $257.bn in 2021, and the most recent accounts for Google Ireland show the unit made a profit of €2.2bn in 2020.

Margaret Heffernan – CEO, Dunnes Stores

Margaret Heffernan left school at 14 to work in Dunnes clothing shop in Cork and has been with the company her father Ben Dunne founded all her working life. 

She replaced her brother Ben Jr as CEO of Dunnes in 1992, and took the company in a more upmarket direction, but she has ceded some control to the next generation of the family in recent years.

Dunnes remains privately owned and has become Ireland’s largest retailer with 134 stores across Ireland, Northern Ireland and Spain. The company employs around 15,000 people and is consistently ranked as Ireland’s largest grocery retailer in terms of market share.

Cathy Kearney – VP of European Operations, Apple

Cathy Kearney has worked for Apple for as long as the iPhone maker has been based in Ireland, being described by the Guardian as the company’s top lieutenant in Ireland and credited for the Irish units’ profit success, attracting scrutiny from the EU and the US Senate.

A graduate of UCC living in Youghal, Kearney was formerly the sole Irish-resident director of Apple Operations Ltd, the Apple Inc-owned Irish company that manufactures Apple devices and which recorded turnover of €211bn and profits of €26bn last year.

Kearney gave a rare interview this year at the opening of Apple’s new European engineering and testing facility in Cork, which she described as “a very long-term strategic investment” by the company, which employs some 6,000 people in Ireland.

Amanda Nelson – CEO, Vodafone Ireland

Amanda Nelson took over as head of Vodafone Ireland, which remains the leading mobile network provider with a third of mobile phone users, earlier this year following O’Leary’s departure for Facebook.

Nelson is a veteran of Vodafone, joining the telecoms giant in 1998 and working in Japan, the Netherlands, Malta and Hungary, where she drove digital transformation and advocated for Vodafone’s diversity and inclusion programmes.

The Englishwoman started in the role in September and said she would aim to build on O’Leary’s accomplishments and expand the company’s connectivity and digital services portfolio. Vodafone Ireland reported turnover of €917.5m and adjusted earnings of €151.8m for the year to March 2021.

Anne Sheehan – General Manager, Microsoft Ireland

Anne Sheehan had big shoes to fill when she took the helm at Microsoft Ireland last October, taking over from Cathriona Hallahan, who stepped down after 35 years with the computing giant in 2020.

Sheehan previously worked as enterprise director at Vodafone UK and ran Vodafone Ireland’s enterprise business. She also held a variety of senior positions at IBM, and studied accounting at the University of Limerick.

Microsoft employs 2,700 people in Ireland and a further 1,800 subsidiaries at LinkedIn’s EMEA HQ in Dublin. The company’s Irish unit, Microsoft Ireland Operations Ltd, recorded revenue of $56.2bn and a profit of $2.7bn last year.

Margaret Sweeney – CEO, Irish Residential Properties REIT

At a time of housing crisis, Margaret Sweeney has the perhaps unenviable position of leading Ireland’s largest residential landlord, IRES REIT, collecting rents of €63m in 2021 on properties worth close to €1.5bn.

Raised in Donegal, Sweeney studied commerce at NUI Galway before starting her career advising FDI clients at KPMG. She later joined semi-state Aer Rianta, where she became CEO in 2003, and then the An Post-Fortis joint venture Postbank.

Sweeney is also on the board of directors at Irish hotel group Dalata, Dublin City University and Teagasc.

Siobhán Talbot – Managing Director, Glanbia

The daughter of a Kilkenny dairy farmer, Siobhán Talbot has led Kilkenny-based nutrition and dairy giant Glanbia for the past nine years, becoming the company’s first female managing director in 2013.

Talbot first joined Glanbia in 1992, rising through the ranks and serving as deputy finance director and group finance director before being elevated to MD. An accountant by trade, Talbot worked at PwC and Waterford Foods prior to joining the company.

Glanbia reported revenues of €4.2bn and profits of €167.4m in 2021, with Talbot crediting strong global consumer demand for Glanbia ingredients and nutrition brands for the company’s strong financial performance.

Photo: (l-r) Siobhán Talbot, Anne Sheehan, and Natasha Adams.(Pic: Aidan Crawley/Bloomberg via Getty Images/Naoise Culhane)