LOW-PROFILE Galway entrepreneur Joe Higgins, who holds an estimated €33m stake in Coltard, the company behind Dun Laoghaire shopping centre, is backing a new regional newspaper in an investment thought to be worth more than €1m.

The Limerick Independent freesheet will launch on March 15, Higgins’s birthday, with a projected circulation of 35,000, and is likely to present a significant challenge to the Limerick Post, the incumbent freesheet that has an audited circulation of nearly 30,000 copies.

The new paper is the third title to be launched by the Independent Free Newspapers group, founded by the Galway duo Declan Dooley and Jarlath Feeney, who also own the Galway Independent and Cork Independent. The Limerick title should bring the group’s total circulation up to more than 140,000, making it the largest freesheet company in the country.

The group has also acquired the freehold for new headquarters in Galway, which local sources have valued at about €2m.

Higgins, who will join Dooley and Feeney on the board of the newspaper group, sold his family engineering business to British-listed outfit Rubicon 10 years ago for €25m cash, plus Rubicon shares that were worth about €16m when the firm was bought out by the American APW group two years later.

Higgins was chairman of Galway airport until last year, and also sits on the board of the company behind the Galway Racing Festival.

Dooley and Feeney acquired the Inside Cork title from UTV, which they rebranded as the Cork Independent, for €500,000 last year and have since invested a similar sum in the paper. It has just received audited status with a circulation of a little less than 50,000.