–A new era of leadership at Collen
Having taken up the post of Chief Executive Officer of Collen in January 2026, MARK MCGREEVY speaks with ROBBIE COUSINS about moving from opportunity-led to intent-driven international growth and safeguarding an eight-generation legacy built on safety, technical complexity, and long-term delivery certainty.
Mark McGreevy’s appointment as CEO of Collen in January 2026 represents a highly significant moment in the evolution of one of the most respected names in European construction.
A tier-one, engineering-led specialist contractor, Collen is renowned for delivering exceptionally complex projects across Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Northern Europe. While the business boasts deep Irish roots and an extraordinary eight generations of family involvement, its modern trajectory is defined by sophisticated technical capability and substantial, continuous investment in people, systems and delivery expertise.
This rare combination of multi-generational ownership and progressive leadership has forged a corporate culture anchored in safety, integrity, innovation and high-performance execution. Today, this culture remains entirely central to the business as it operates at an unprecedented industrial scale.
In recent years, the company has experienced substantial growth, with its annual turnover reaching a milestone of €1.7bn. This scale reflects the robust consistency of its technical delivery model, achieved whilst diligently maintaining the qualities that distinguish the business in a volatile global market. Rather than chasing short-term expansion or high-risk volume, Collen did what it always did: Prioritise disciplined decision-making, long-term relationship-building, and a steadfast willingness to invest sustainably through complex market cycles.
Mark McGreevy
Stepping into the executive cockpit, Mark McGreevy brings over 30 years of tier-one construction industry experience. Having previously served as a non-executive director of Collen, he provides a seamless blend of continuity and fresh strategic insight at a pivotal juncture for the enterprise.
EVOLVING LEADERSHIP AND REPEATABLE EXCELLENCE
Reflecting on his transition to the CEO role, McGreevy describes his mandate not as a radical departure but as a deliberate and exciting progression to build the next operational phase with absolute clarity and consistency.
The business has grown rapidly, driven by its exceptional reputation in technically demanding environments. Whilst this growth stands as an immense credit to the dedication of the internal teams, McGreevy is acutely aware that rapid corporate expansion inevitably stretches systems, communication channels, and organisational capacity across multijurisdictional borders.
He comments, “Collen combines the long-term mindset of an independently owned business with the engineering capability, operational discipline and delivery certainty required in modern mission-critical construction. We’re proud of our position in the Irish construction sector, but we are even prouder of the standards, people and engineering expertise behind this – and we’re focused on building the next chapter with discipline, innovation and long-term commitment.”
To address these challenges directly, McGreevy has structured the executive management team to unite broad, highly specialised expertise across construction delivery, commercial management, finance, and rigorous legal governance. This strategic mix of senior experience strengthens executive decision-making, supports a deeply integrated approach to technically complex project environments and creates deeper customer and supply chain relationships.
“The primary objective is to transition from reactive management to a framework of scalable, predictable and profitable performance that preserves the traditional values of the business while aggressively modernising its execution infrastructure.”
He emphasises that his core focus is to protect the foundational strengths that have defined Collen for generations.
“The goal is to keep what is genuinely great about Collen, specifically its technical delivery strength, core values, and long-term continuity, while simultaneously modernising how the business plans, collaborates and governs our projects. The objective is to ensure that performance is thoroughly repeatable, scalable, and data-driven rather than reactive, thereby establishing a robust platform for the next chapter of corporate growth.”
AN INTERNATIONAL PLATFORM FOR MISSION-CRITICAL DELIVERY
Collen now operates from a highly sophisticated international delivery platform, seamlessly combining deep local market knowledge with multi-jurisdictional engineering expertise. While maintaining a strong, diversified presence in Ireland, the company has established a rapidly expanding footprint across the United Kingdom and key European markets, with a particular emphasis on northern Europe. The firm’s regional and technical leadership structure has been purpose-built over time to support these complex, cross-border projects, ensuring that client expectations are met uniformly regardless of geography.
Mission-critical and digital infrastructure projects constitute the primary sector focus for Collen in the UK and the Nordic regions. In these highly demanding environments, the company continues to deliver advanced facilities for global technology clients. This sector focus is a key driver of Collen’s international growth strategy and represents the core of its engineering expertise.
“Since 2010, Collen has delivered just shy of a staggering 1 Giga Watt of hyperscale and colocation data centre capacity across Ireland, the UK and continental Europe, supporting some of the world’s largest technology giants. To support this vast international expansion, we leverage our Dublin-based Data Centre of Excellence. This facility functions as a centralised hub to strengthen our technical coordination, share engineering insights, and scale best practices across all international projects.”
He adds, “As the business continues to expand internationally, there is a strong emphasis on strengthening communication, standardisation, and integrated delivery across regions so that our global clients experience the same level of certainty, quality, and technical coordination regardless of their geographic location.”
MILESTONES IN ENERGY AND DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE
The past 12 months have yielded a series of standout project achievements that underline Collen’s technical execution, particularly within the energy and digital infrastructure sectors. A major highlight in public and private infrastructure delivery is the Grange Backup Power facility at Grange Castle. This 110-megawatt energy project was delivered as Ireland’s first industrial-scale, dual-fuel backup power station, representing a significant milestone for national grid stability and sustainable engineering integration.
The business is also approaching a highly significant milestone of over one gigawatt of data centre capacity constructed to date. These massive undertakings highlight Collen’s specialised capability in mission-critical environments, requiring advanced mechanical, electrical, and plumbing integration, complex commissioning sequences, and high-density technical infrastructure.
For Mark McGreevy, these milestones are indicative of an underlying operational consistency that spans the entire organisation.
He reflects, “The standout successes are the ones that demonstrate disciplined engineering and operational execution, characterised by safe delivery, predictable milestones, and clean handovers in complex environments.”
What he is most proud of is not any single headline or massive metric, but rather the operational consistency displayed by teams solving problems early, coordinating effectively across complex disciplines, and maintaining the highest standards under intense pressure.
“This calibre of performance builds long-term client trust and allows the business to scale internationally without losing the standards that are central to our continued success.”
NAVIGATING HEADWINDS WITH COMMERCIAL DISCIPLINE
In Ireland, Collen maintains a highly diversified yet focused portfolio that spans technically led residential developments, commercial schemes, power generation projects and public infrastructure. This extensive breadth provides vital resilience across market cycles, maintaining active operations in multiple sections of the construction market. Looking forward, the company’s pipeline remains exceptionally strong, particularly within its core sectors and geographies. A notable highlight includes celebrating 10 years as an established, successful business in Sweden next year.
Furthermore, major public infrastructure investment in Ireland, including projects like MetroLink and extensive power grid upgrades, is expected to create substantial opportunities for the business to leverage its strengths in complex infrastructure delivery.
However, McGreevy says this strong pipeline must be balanced against wider construction industry pressures, including macroeconomic uncertainty, severe material cost volatility and highly constrained labour and supply chain capacity.
“Our approach has been to remain intensely disciplined in our approach to work-winning. We align new opportunities with available internal resources, pursue early engagement with clients and supply chain partners, and focus strongly on preconstruction planning and engineering coordination to create greater certainty before any on-site activities commence.”
A PRACTICAL BLUEPRINT FOR SUSTAINABILITY AND CULTURE
As the construction industry faces mounting pressure to decarbonise, Collen has adopted a deeply pragmatic approach to sustainability and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria. Rather than treating ESG as an isolated corporate initiative or a marketing exercise, Collen embeds sustainability directly into its daily engineering, procurement, and construction methodologies. This involves an aggressive focus on modern methods of construction, advanced off-site solutions, digital engineering and meticulous coordination to eliminate waste, enhance productivity, and significantly lower carbon intensity across its international project portfolio. The tangible results of this practical approach are highly measurable.
Collen has reduced on-site manhours by 86,300 on a typical hyperscale data centre project through off-site fabrication and digital planning. The company continues to push these boundaries, with a number of future initiatives currently in progress aimed at achieving equally ambitious results.
McGreevy notes that sustainability has to be entirely practical, defining how the company designs, procures, and builds.
“Our focus is on utilising practical tools and discipline, incorporating better data, stronger planning and digital processes that make it easier for site teams to execute projects. Digital capability is a critical enabler of scalable delivery and repeatable excellence, particularly in mission-critical environments where quality, speed, and tight coordination are essential.”
This engineering discipline is balanced by a strong focus on talent retention and corporate culture. In an industry facing a severe skills shortage, Collen relies on transparency and professional development to attract and retain elite personnel.
Mark McGreevy asserts that the competition for talent is real, and it cannot be won with corporate slogans.
“People stay where they feel genuinely valued, where leadership is consistent, and where there is real opportunity to grow. A major part of the current journey at Collen involves strengthening culture through clearer communication, greater collaboration across regions, and high leadership visibility, ensuring that colleagues feel proud of what they are building and how they are building it.
IN CONCLUSION
At an international scale, the modern construction industry presents formidable challenges, chief among them being intense margin pressure, supply chain capacity constraints, and the sheer technical complexity of project delivery, especially when design information is late or lopsided contracts attempt to push undue risk down the supply chain.
Mark McGreevy believes the healthiest response to these systemic industry challenges is to return to construction fundamentals: “Collen is committed to having better project selection, fairer risk allocation, disciplined planning and strong, mutually beneficial partnerships with our supply chain”.
He adds, “This is the strategic direction Collen is going, because it protects our clients and employees, and it safeguards the long-term reputation of the industry.”
The key takeaway from his early tenure as CEO is simple. Collen is a robust business with a powerful brand, exceptional technical capability and great people positioned at a specific moment where modernisation matters. For Mark McGreevy, the year ahead is dedicated to building a more integrated and engineering-led operating model by strengthening pre-construction, investing in scalable digital systems, and keeping culture and safety at the absolute centre of project delivery. In this respect, he refers to his ‘3 – P’s’ – “our focus on our people, our pathway and our performance”.
Ultimately, Collen’s story cannot be measured solely by the scale of its turnover or the size of its projects; it is a narrative defined by longevity, deep-rooted values, and a deliberate intent to keep building for future generations.
Looking to the future, Mark McGreevy concludes by saying, “While firms can talk about rapid growth, our focus is on maintaining sustainable performance, strengthening our technical capability, maintaining our rigorous standards as the business scales, and building an enterprise that will still be widely respected for its engineering, culture and delivery performance in another 200 years, not for the next generation but for the generation after that and beyond.”
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