MetroLink, the proposed 19km stretch of railway linking Swords to Charlemont in south Dublin, is a “key target” for construction group Sisk, its chief executive Paul Brown has said, and the firm has formed a joint venture to tender for the project.
Brown declined to identify Sisk’s joint venture partners.
However, the group was named alongside Spanish construction giant Dragados and Irish infrastructure specialist J Murphy & Sons as partners in a joint venture in documents published by the UK department of business and trade last year. The document invited British railway suppliers to attend an information briefing about the MetroLink project.
Sisk and Dragados have partnered up on other large-scale projects, including the construction of 11.9km of twin bore tunnels in London as part of the Elizabeth line railway project. The companies were awarded the €600 million contract in 2010.
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“MetroLink is a key target for us,” Brown told The Irish Times on Wednesday. In the autumn, the Coalition is expected to consider putting out the tenders for the project, which will be constructed in phases, with preparatory works potentially getting under way as early as next year.
Brown was speaking following the publication of Sisk’s 2025 annual results. Operating profits at Sicon Ltd, the main company in the group, surged by more than 37 per cent to €67 million, despite a slight decrease in turnover to €2.62 billion, which Brown said was a “non-issue”, related to technical matters around how revenues are booked.
“One metric we do look at is the hours that we work, and in 2024 and 2025, that was largely similar,” he said.
Meanwhile, Sisk’s gross profit margin widened significantly from 6 per cent to 7.6 per cent in 2025, the group said.
The accounts also confirm that the group paid a €30 million dividend to its shareholders, mostly members of the Sisk family, last year. As previously reported by The Irish Times, this brings to €51 million the total that the group has paid out in dividends since 2024.
Looking ahead, Sisk said its advance order book stands at €7.2 billion.
“What we’re seeing is probably a great optimism here in Ireland around the pipeline,” Brown said, related to the Government’s National Development Plan (NDP). “I think there’ll be an attractiveness to the Irish market that will come, that is coming in 2026, and I think will come in 2027 and 2028,” he said.
He said there has been “slight improvement” in the labour market in the Republic over the past year after a period of tightness. “We continue to invest heavily in early careers, apprenticeship, graduate programmes,” Brown said. “That’s one lever that we can pull to try to arrest that in the shorter to medium term.”
The construction industry has expressed concern about steeply rising construction materials prices in the wake of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the spiralling conflict in the Gulf region.
Brown said there were “some challenges in the earlier part of the year” with input prices, but “I think they are settled” somewhat.
Looking ahead, he said Sisk has just recently secured a contract for the next phase of the Adare bypass, which will be an important undertaking for the group this year. The project has “a very specific end date linked to the Ryder Cup”.
