‘Business is about nothing more and nothing less than relationships’

Val Cummins was always going to choose the sea. As a teen, she didn’t quite know in which capacity, but her curiosity in a vessel named Asgard II was what kicked off her maritime and marine escapades.

“It was an absolutely beautiful national sail training vessel – it just captured my imagination. I read about it somewhere and when I was 16 I wrote a letter to a lady called Lillian White, Coiste an Asgard, Department of Defence, Kildare Street, Dublin. I still remember the details.

“I got myself a part-time job in Roches Stores in Cork, saved up the money and went off on my first trip. My parents brought me up to Dún Laoghaire, I’d never been on a sailing ship in my life – the first thing we had to do was an ‘up and over’ up one side of the mast and back down the other, the next morning we set sail for the island of Islay, Scotland, and it was just amazing.”

Sailing is still a huge part of her life and she’s fresh from a sailing trip with her musician husband Ken and their children when I speak with her.

“We’ve just come off two weeks with the five of us, and a dog, on a 33-foot sailboat in rubbish weather and we are still smiling and laughing. It wasn’t a glorious two weeks, but we just had a great time. Family, for me, is really important.”

I had, you could say, a relatively late awakening to feminism.”

As well as sailing Cummins is also an avid rower – well she’s from Cork, like. It is an interest she has reignited since her kids have gotten older, with more time to dedicate to it now.

“We’ve started to get quite competitive with the crew that I’m in [and] that has brought it to another level because there is an intensity to the commitment and the training that goes with that. But I just love feeling this fit and I love being part of a crew of eight masters women.”

This is the same intensity with which she tackled her academic career, spanning 21 years, where her highlights and accolades include a PhD in Public Participation and Sustainability Science in Coastal Decision Making, a directorship of the Coastal and Marine Resources Centre from 2003-2010, an Eisenhower fellowship and a senior lecturer position in Marine Governance and Innovation at University College Cork.

Ireland is a tiny island nation, but it was characterised with a lot of sea blindness.”

Val Cummins is the Chief Impact Officer and Board Director for Simply Blue Energy Ireland. The Simply Blue Group develops blue economy projects, using the ocean as a resource to decarbonise the planet.

Equal seat at the table

“For quite a long time in my career, it didn’t matter that I was the only woman in the room because I always felt that I was able to represent myself as well as anybody else. Having said that I made sure I had the ammunition that I needed to have an equal seat at the table and by that I mean getting my doctorate was really important in that context.”

“I had, you could say, a relatively late awakening to feminism. I have a really deep appreciation now of needing to be very sensitive to being the only woman in the room and doing everything I can to call it out.

We talk a lot about imposter syndrome and I suffered from that massively at the beginning but I think I covered it up well enough.”

“There are amazing women in energy and in marine energy in particular -but at senior-level leadership, at the board level, there aren’t enough of us.

“Women have an empathy that is important to bring into business because at the end of the day business is about nothing more, or nothing less than relationships. Yes, they need to be profitable, they need to be sustainable but it all boils down to relationships.”

Unexpected award win

Despite her illustrious career in the marine space, being the recipient of the Sustainability Champion category award at the IMAGE PwC Businesswoman of the Year Awards in May came as a huge surprise, so much so she was wholly unprepared.

“I was due to go on a business trip the following morning, on the Saturday, to Tokyo and I was focused on that. I felt that if you were really going to win something like this, that you’d have had a heads up. So [when I heard nothing], I assumed that I hadn’t won.

“I had been nominated by two amazing women in PwC who had organised a table and supported me. I think I got back to Cork at 3am – it was a tough old journey back, but I drove home with such a pep in my step, such a buzz. It was just really overwhelming and fantastic.”

Cummins’ high got her all the way to Japan the next day and a chance to look at how others are tackling decarbonisation and offshore wind solutions.

“Different countries have emerged as early leaders, in relation to offshore wind and globally, Europe is definitely at the moment in a tenuous leadership position – other parts of the world, in Asia and America, are catching up.

“Those fast followers may quickly usurp Europe’s leadership position if Europe doesn’t manage to move a lot of bureaucratic red tape out of the way and accelerate towards the kind of solutions we need to see at a large scale for climate change.”

Playing catch-up as a nation

Surprisingly, for an island, Ireland doesn’t hold a candle to Europe in the offshore wind energy stakes.

“Ireland is very far behind the rest of Europe. We were one of the first countries in the world to build an offshore wind farm on the Arklow banks off the southeast coast – the late Eddie O’Connor led that project – a visionary about 20 years ago, but then Ireland turned its attention to onshore wind and in fairness, we’ve been very successful in integrating onshore wind into our grid.

“We have a marine area that’s seven times our land mass. We have a God-given gift by way of our continental shelf and our Atlantic area. It’s not called the Wild Atlantic Way for nothing. The reason that we’re way behind is because we’ve only recently started to put the regulatory frameworks in place – we’re playing catch-up but we’re starting from a very low base.”

Cummins is an award-winning author, she co-wrote The Coastal Atlas of Ireland with academic colleagues at UCC, which looks at Ireland’s relationship with the coastline and the sea. It’s a literary heavyweight weighing in at just under 5kg.

It didn’t matter that I was the only woman in the room because I always felt that I was able to represent myself as well as anybody else.”

“Ireland is a tiny island nation, but it was characterised really, with a lot of sea blindness. We looked inland – we’ve become really successful at building clusters in biomedical devices, ICT, and pharmaceuticals. The next big cluster we need to develop is our main energy cluster, and to wake up and start turning now towards the sea.”

Ireland’s energy vulnerability

She cites Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a trigger point to shake Ireland’s need for energy independence. “It put our energy vulnerability into stark relief. Ireland is one of the biggest importers of oil and gas than any other European member states; we’re extremely vulnerable.

“The tide is turning, we have this wild Atlantic wind resource that can help us to decarbonise, that can help us to achieve energy security, and that can be utterly transformative in terms of economic development, particularly for the west coast, with jobs and future sustainability of coastal communities.”

Done right it could lead to massive opportunities to export electricity into Europe.

“For example, via interconnectors, or to shift it in other forms, like molecules derived from hydrogen. To be competitive in meeting that demand, we need to be thinking big to make sure that we can compete against cheaper sources of clean, green renewable electricity, for example, solar coming from North Africa.”

One issue with offshore wind solutions is the impact on the marine environment, it can be like giving with one hand but taking something with the other.

“We could get bogged down and we could lose our way looking at the micro-level issues, but if we don’t build these offshore wind farms and find alternatives to fossil fuels, then what we’re going to be left with is an acidified ocean with a huge issue around marine heat waves where all marine life is in jeopardy, so you have to make those choices.”

A baptism of fire

Cummins joined Simply Blue Group in 2020. She’d met one of the co-founders Sam Roch-Perks while working on EirWind, a blueprint for offshore wind in Ireland.

“It was a multi-disciplinary project – we looked at the economics, the engineering, the biological aspects and policy – it was a fabulous project. It gave me a real appreciation for the business dimension – and that was the catalyst for me to make the jump.”

That leap brought her into a completely different world.

“It’s not that research was less stressful or less busy or less demanding, but the world of business can be intense in a very different way. It was a baptism of fire because honestly, I didn’t know much or anything about business.

We need to be thinking big to make sure that we can compete against cheaper sources of clean, green renewable electricity.”

“How it works from a commercial point of view, how development works, how you manage risk in that context – I had to learn that double fast. We talk a lot about imposter syndrome and I suffered from that massively at the beginning but I think I covered it up well enough.”

Reflecting on the last four years in the world of business, “I’ve learnt so much and I think that’s what is so exciting and so rewarding – that’s why it was the right thing for me to make the move, because there was so much more to learn and that’s what really keeps me motivated.”

This is the fourth in a series of articles written in collaboration with The Currency. Chief Executive of The Currency, Tom Lyons, was a judge at the annual IMAGE PwC Businesswoman of the Year Awards.

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