Business

Business leaders Coburn and Keating are knighted in New Year Honours list

Nick Coburn of Ulster Carpets has been knighted
Nick Coburn of Ulster Carpets has been knighted Nick Coburn of Ulster Carpets has been knighted

TWO of Northern Ireland's best-known business figures, Nick Coburn and Dr Bryan Keating, have been knighted in the New Year Honours list.

And an OBE has gone to Donegal-born Pat Doherty, who helped transform the Titanic Quarter site in Belfast into one of Europe's most prestigious waterfront developments.

Nick Coburn (59) is group managing director and vice-chairman of Ulster Carpet Mills in Portadown, the only surviving major woven-carpet manufacturer in Britain and Ireland.

Since succeeding Mike Mills into the role more than a decade ago, he has helped oversee the firm's growth into one of the leading luxury carpet-makers in the world, with a client list including casinos and high-end hotels in Dubai and the US.

In its last trading year Ulster Carpets, founded 80 years ago by Jean and George Walter Wilson and now chaired by their son Edward, reported an 11.5 per cent rise in sales to a record £76.3 million while pre-tax profits spiralled by 59 per cent to £10.7 million.

Mr Coburn is also a past president of the NI Chamber of Commerce.

Technology entrepreneur Dr Keating (68) from Newtownabbey, who received an OBE six years ago, has been a director of and an investor in a number of Northern Ireland-based hi-tech businesses over the last four decades years.

He chairs MATRIX, a business-led science industry panel set up to advise government, industry and academia on the commercial exploitation of research and development and science and technology in the north, and he is also non-executive chair of The Learning Pool in Derry.

He has sat on a number of boards down the years, including serving as vice-chairman of Invest NI, and he is an active director of the Northern Ireland Science Park Foundation.

For many years previously he also sat on the boards of QUBIS, University Challenge Fund Investment Committee, Investment Belfast, halo the NI Business Angel Network, Momentum and the NI Centre for Entrepreneurship.

Dr Keating is a visiting professor at the University of Ulster, was Northern Ireland's IT Professional of the Year 1995, received the Queen's Award for Enterprise Promotion in 2006 and is Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

An MBE has gone to 76-year-old Donegal developer Pat Doherty, chairman of Harcourt Developments, which is behind Titanic Quarter.

He officially launched the Titanic master plan in 2005, and since then the development has come to life with major commercial, tourism, residential and education schemes, re-energising Belfast’s waterfront and former shipbuilding lands.

Mr Doherty - who famously was painted by artist Lucian Freud and starred in a Beatles video in his youth - established a successful construction business in London in the early 1960s from which he grew a diverse property portfolio.

His unique skill in evaluating opportunities and his judgment and expertise has been the driving force behind a 50-year career of successful development.

Among the other business leaders acknowledged in the honours list is Melanie Christie-Boyle, chief executive of Ballymena Business Centre, who received an MBE for services to the economy.