Succession can throw up some tricky issues, as Albert Manifold is finding out at CRH. The building materials company's chief executive, installed in January to succeed Myles Lee, must plot CRH a fresh course for the future, as he simultaneously deals with the mistakes of its past. All without offending people.

CRH paid top dollar during the boom for several assets in Europe that have performed poorly since the financial crash. When Manifold took over this year, a portfolio review to identify under-performing units was already underway, raising doubts over the future of 30 per cent of its €15 billion asset base. About a third of the sinners it has identified – equivalent to 10 per cent of assets – have since been put on the blocks. Another third will be retained by CRH but “fixed”, while the prognosis of the remainder will be revealed later this year. Analysts expect most of the final tranche to also be sold.

Lee and Liam O’Mahony, Manifold’s two predecessors, left him to deal with a litany of ill-advised purchases. The tightrope he must now walk is to draw a line under CRH’s recent acquisition mistakes, without disowning them.

“We did more right than wrong” during the boom, Manifold yesterday said, rather magnanimously, of his predecessors’ reigns. Of the €24 billion it spent on acquisitions during this period, he insisted, it had taken a writedown of only €750 million.

That may be true, but the writedowns fell on just €1.5 billion of assets. Of the businesses it has already identified for sale, CRH has written off half their book value. Those buys were big mistakes. Manifold said in February that CRH had “forgotten its core principles” during the boom by buying assets inflated by property bubbles. Yesterday, he declined to repeat this statement, and was careful instead not to say anything further that might be construed as criticism of his predecessors.

So far, the new CRH boss has struck the right tone.