CRH plc is an international group of diversified building materials businesses whose headquarters is in Dublin, Ireland.

[5] CRH entered the United States in 1978 by buying Amcor, a concrete products group in Utah which would then form the basis of the company's U.S. division, which is now called Oldcastle Inc.

Subsequent large purchases in the US included Callanan Industries, a New York State based aggregates and asphalt producer in 1985.

[12] CRH acquired Balf Co. in Connecticut, Lebanon Rock in Pennsylvania, Keating in Massachusetts and Sullivan Lafarge in New York state in 1994.

[14] The company entered Switzerland in 2000 with the EUR 425 million purchase of Jura Group, adding cement, concrete and aggregates operations, as well as a regional distribution network.

[16] In July 2003 it agreed to pay EUR 693 million to acquire Cementbouw - a do-it-yourself store chain and building materials producer in the Netherlands.

[34] In April 2017, the Irish Times noted that chief executive Albert Manifold's package almost doubled in 2016 to €10 million, despite disagreement among shareholders the year before on pay.

[37] On 27 April 2017, CRH held their annual general meeting in Dublin, at which point 17 percent of shareholders voted against the company's executive pay structure.

[40] By the end of 2017, the biggest acquisition was Fels-Werke GmbH, a German leading lime and aggregates business with 1 billion tonnes of high-quality limestone reserves, 11 production locations, nine in Germany and one in both the Czech Republic and Russia.

[40] In July 2019, CRH announced that it was selling its underperforming European distribution arm to Blackstone, a US investment firm, for €1.64 billion.

[51] In 2009, Grupa Ożarów (in which CRH first invested in 1995) was fined €26 million for operating a price fixing cartel in Poland.

CRH has stated its belief that Ozarów operated an independent commercial policy in Poland and the fine was appealed.

[55] In 2012, CRH applied successfully to have the claim dismissed on the basis of the "inordinate and inexcusable delay" in bringing forward any evidence in the case.

At the time of the appeal it emerged that the presiding judge in the proceedings had ownership of some shares in CRH and was forced to stand down.

Plaintiffs challenged a contract requiring developers to purchase Oldcastle Precast product for properties served by AT&T infrastructure.

In 2010, an American Court of Appeal ruled that the plaintiff's counsel had failed to provide enough evidence to show that the defendants harmed competition in California and Nevada telephone vault markets.

[59] In October 2009, a cement and concrete price fixing class action lawsuit was filed in Florida against Oldcastle Materials and others.

The claim alleged that the defendants eliminated competition in the market for cement and concrete by charging artificially high prices from at least the period 2000 to 2009.

[76] Many opposition members of parliament voiced concerns that at the time of sale, Charles Haughey was Taoiseach and his financier Des Traynor was Chairman of CRH.

Dáil Éireann voted not to investigate whether CRH had donated funds to any political party or politician before or after the purchase of Glen Ding.

The attraction of concluding the sale at what was considered a good price outweighed the imperative to act evenhandedly which is a basic principle when the State is doing business".

"[79] In 2005, opposition TD (Teachta Dála - Irish member of parliament) Phil Hogan, who later became Minister for Environment (2011 - ), stated in Dáil Éireann that "there is a widespread problem with competition in this economy...

In the case of CRH, profits have been extracted from the Irish economy by means of a complex industry structure that is both anti-competitive and anti-consumer.

While Sweden, Finland, UK, France and Germany have since levied huge fines against the cement industry, Ireland’s answer has been a stony silence.