Construction giant builds a sustainable future in Ireland

There is an almost-unadulterated hipness to Dublin’s Grand Canal Docks area these days – Facebook’s international headquarters in one corner, Airbnb’s European “home” in another, and a seemingly endless supply of funky cafes and restaurants everywhere.

Despite initial appearances though, the neighbourhood isn't entirely about skinny-jeaned hipsters, with the Irish base of global consulting engineers Arup tucked in beside the Ringsend bus garage doing its bit to keep things anchored in the real, as opposed to the virtual, world.

Arup is an international giant in the world of infrastructure and all sorts of construction, but the nature of its role – in everything from road design, to town planning to business physics – means it tends to fly under the radar outside its industries.

Thus, we may be unaware that it has played a leading part in some of the State’s most iconic modern architecture – Dublin’s Bord Gáis Energy Theatre and T2 at Dublin Airport are two of its more recent grand, public projects. In the past, the company has worked on the Central Bank’s much-loved/hated headquarters in Dublin’s Dame Street and on the listed Dublin Bus Donnybrook Garage, also in the city – in short, it has had an environmental influence on a lot of people’s lives whether they realise it or not.

Eoghan Lynch, the boss of Arup's Irish business for the last three years, describes the company's role in such buildings as "making sure they stand up". It sounds simple when Lynch, a confident but low-key Corkman, puts it like that but the long list of company services that he has at his fingertips suggests otherwise.

Founded in Ireland in 1946, Arup these days works as much on infrastructural projects such as roads, schools, energy delivery and traffic engineering (it is a leader in open-road tolling such as the eflow system) as on major buildings. At the moment, it is managing the roll-out of the a free bikes scheme in the Dublin Bikes mode to Cork, Limerick and Galway while, at the same time, working on the N6, the Kinsale Head gas field and, from Dublin, delivering the construction of a new hospital in Vienna.

And that’s just the start of it.

A civil engineer by training, Lynch has worked with the company since 1989, joining its Cork office to work on offshore energy infrastructure after spending a decade in that industry in London. He “migrated” into management and, since landing the top Irish job in 2011, he spends part of his week in Dublin but always heads home to Kinsale for the weekend.

Lynch’s typical working day in Dublin would extend from 8am to 8pm, a level of commitment that he says is common in a business that often involves long stays away from home as projects reach completion.

“You’re on the job all the time. You’re always thinking about it,” he says.

The timing of Lynch’s move into the driving seat at Arup meant he had to oversee what most businesses have experienced during the recession: downsizing. He was already well used to managing people, with the firm’s project management skills among its strongest qualities, but this still wasn’t easy.

“We’ve got 360 people now. At the peak, we had 550,” he says.

Sister operations
Lynch recalls the cracks in the market starting to show as 2008 moved towards 2009 and no new projects were arising to replace those being completed.

“We had time to adjust and react,” he says, adding that while redundancies were needed, the company was careful not to deplete entire teams.

“These were excellent people; there just wasn’t enough work,” says Lynch, before expressing pleasure about the company preparing to welcome back one of its former employees who has since retrained.

The recession saw Arup lean both on its legacy of more than 60 years in Ireland and on its global scale, factors which helped it to live through the lean times while numerous competitors exited the stage. In some cases, the company sent staff to its sister operations abroad, which meant they weren’t lost to the Irish operation for the long term but were no longer on its books.

It also used its international network to bid for jobs outside Ireland, a strategy which has led to up to 15 per cent of its activities being sourced abroad.Current international work includes the Austrian hospital and pharmaceutical work in the Netherlands and Switzerland.

The company is based on, and continues to operate to, the philosophy of its founder Sir Ove Arup, the English-reared son of a Danish father and Norwegian mother who was an engineer with a highly-developed conscience. Arup, who died in 1988, was all about "total architecture", whereby all design decisions are made with reference to each other, thus producing artistic "wholeness". He also strived for "the humanitarian attitude", which would see large and efficient organisations being "human and friendly" in spite of their size.

One legacy of this has been that the Arup group, with its 11,000 staff across 38 countries (it doesn’t use sub-contractors) and £1 billion turnover, is owned in trust for the benefit of its people. A profit-sharing system applies, whereby group performance trickles down to all staff members, regardless of how their own operation performed in the given period.

In the case of Ireland, it is clear that the last few years have been tough, with the business losing €3.7 million on revenues of €29.6 million in the 12 months to the end of March 2013. This compared to a profit of €7.2 million on turnover of €32.6 million a year earlier.

Lynch says numbers are still being finalised but he expects “a modest profit” to be recorded for the 12 months just ended. It’s progress, but perhaps the time for a party by the banks of the Grand Canal Docks has not quite arrived.

“You can’t say the recession is over,” says Lynch, with some firmness, but he acknowledges that the pipeline is picking up a touch, at least in parts. Arup expects to win a new road contract over coming weeks, for example, but must balance this against the loss of a 1,500km underground cable-routing project connected to now-ditched plans to export wind energy to Britain.

In the meantime, it will look to increase its international workload, tapping into the global Arup network, of which it is one of the most elderly members, having been founded almost at the same time as the original London headquarters.

Ove Arup, by then well-known for his innovative work with concrete, first became involved in Ireland just after the second World War, having been invited over by renowned architect Michael Scott to work on the Donnybrook Bus Garage.

This led to a key role in Dublin’s Busáras, a building unappreciated by many but adored by engineers and other concrete enthusiasts from far and wide (it’s all about the frilly concrete waves), by which stage the Irish practice was firmly established. Meanwhile, Arup also expanded elsewhere, making his name with work on the Sydney Opera House and on the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Lynch is, understandably, a big Ove Arup fan, with a particular fondness of his “key speech”, a kind of manifesto delivered by the company founder in 1970. It is from here that Lynch has drawn a sense of the business needing to deliver “social usefulness” as well as providing for the “reasonable prosperity of its members”.

Happily, the “member” numbers in Ireland are now ticking back up slowly, along with profits. Over the last three years, the company has taken on close to 60 engineering graduates and it plans to increase that this year.

Lynch takes heart from a number of road projects stalled during the early bailout days now restarting and reports that the company has also secured a degree of refurbishment work from the various international groups that have been buying into the Irish commercial property market.

In general, Lynch says more bank lending is badly needed, with work outside the public and cash arenas still thin on the ground. “We need to see the banks release more credit. We do see an improvement in the commercial sector but a lot of that is cash.”

He highlights a particular need for new office infrastructure in the Grand Canal area where Arup and all of the cool internet companies are choosing to base themselves, saying the IDA is doing a great job of reeling in companies but that office providers are moving too slowly to meet their needs.

For now, Lynch is particularly pleased with the public bikes project, which he says falls into Ove Arup’s “social usefulness” category.

“He was talking about sustainability and we try to operate on that basis,” Lynch says, displaying some hipster tendencies after all.

CV: Eoghan Lynch
Name: Eoghan Lynch

Age: 56

Position: Country director and leader at Arup.

Family: Married to Phil with three grown-up children – a daughter who works in banking, one son who aims to become a commercial diver and one son who plans to work in film production.

Something you might expect: A Cork native, he is an avid supporter of Munster Rugby

Something that might surprise: A little later than most, he has just started to learn to surf.