British public companies do not feature in this column very often, but one British plc with a substantial Irish presence is looking attractive once again after going through a sticky patch. Rubicon Group is the British company and the Irish connection is Higgins Engineering, the Galway-based family-owned manufacturer of computer cabinets that Rubicon bought for £25 million two years ago.

Rubicon shares fell earlier in this year as the market for many of the group's products took a dive, but the prospects for next year look immeasurably better.

And Joe Higgins, the reclusive Galwayman who became a multi-millionaire after Rubicon bought the company, seems more confident than most about the prospects for the firm.

In the past couple weeks, Mr Higgins has spent almost £1.5 million sterling buying Rubicon shares and now holds 4.5 million shares or more than 5 per cent of the total. That investment was a particularly astute one by Mr Higgins.

Since then the shares have risen from the 113p sterling he paid for them to 145p, leaving the Galwayman sitting on a paper profit of almost £420,000, to add to the millions he received when Rubicon bought him out.