OBE for businesswoman with Goleen family links

A UK businesswoman, with strong West Cork links, has been named in the king’s birthday honours list.

Jacqueline O’Donovan, whose parents are from Goleen, and who spends a lot of time in West Cork, will be in Skibbereen this weekend to address an awards ceremony of local business women.

Jacqueline is the first woman to lead the UK’s waste management and recycling industry, and this week was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the King’s Birthday Honours list to recognise her outstanding services to her industry. 

The high-profile businesswoman and social entrepreneur has led the UK waste and recycling industry for more than 36 years and has been pivotal in transforming the sector’s safety and sustainability practices. She is recognised as an industry disruptor and trailblazing female business leader and an advocate of safe, green, and sustainable operations. 

‘To come from such humble beginnings, and to leave school with little to no qualifications and do a job that I absolutely love in an amazing transforming industry is such a surreal feeling,’ she said this week.

Her parents moved from Goleen in the 1950s to northwest London, or what was fondly known as ‘County Kilburn’, due to the prevalence of Irish families, where all four O’Donovan children were born. All six members of the family lived in a cramped one-bedroom flat until Jacqueline was five and the family moved to north London. 

Life was to get harder when her father, Joe, who worked in construction until 1959 before starting his own demolition company, and then moving into waste management, passed away unexpectedly in 1985 at the young age of 51. 

Jacqueline and her siblings continued their father’s legacy and the business grew with Jacqueline leading the family firm as managing director from the tender age of 19. 

Now the firm has an annual turnover of over £20m.