Trade Names:With a third generation of Raineys involved in the family's steeplejack business, the firm is on course to scale new heights, writes Rose Doyle

Although it spans centuries, continents, countries and the 32 counties of Ireland, the story of J Rainey & Co is, above all, one about scaling great heights.

Steeplejack brothers Des and Brendan Rainey, and those who work with them, take their job to the seriously high pinnacles of cathedral and church spires, up Corinthian columns and castle gazebos, onto what's left of industrial chimneys, steeples and monuments. They've been up the Poolbeg towers too (painting them) and climbed to conserve Kylemore Abbey and, for the Luas, Milltown Viaduct.

Des and Brendan Rainey are casual about work at sky-high levels, a lot less casual about the safety measures involved. "We're always very, very safe," says Des, "have to be. Your safe return means more than your safe departure in this work."

Steeplejacking is bred in the bones and they know it. They've an enviable pride in what they do, in the company's stone conservation and slating expertise, its specialist knowledge of lightning protection and height surveys.

Brendan Rainey is managing director at the company's base in Swords, Co Dublin. Not that they're much taken with titles and hierarchy; Des claiming to "do everything but bark around here". Informality's all. Except when on high. Brendan, credited with longer memories than Des because he's older, tells most of the story.

Company founder John Rainey was born in 1901 in Whitehouse, near Greencastle, north Belfast. He and Mary Loughran, the woman he fell in love with and married in the late 1930s, had nine children. Five were boys, four were girls and, though none of the girls went aloft, the boys ensured second generation continuance of the company.

"My father went to national school on the shores of Belfast Lough," Brendan says. "His father - my grandfather Charlie Rainey - worked in Skegoneill brickyard and his sisters worked in the local linen mill. But there was no other work around so my father's older brothers, Patrick and Charles, and his cousins, went off seeking employment in England and took up steeplejacking.

"At that time, early in the 20th century, England was the home of the steeplejack because of all the industrial chimneys. Steeplejacking was exempted from conscription. There were no steeplejacks in Ireland at the time and when anything needed doing the brothers and cousins were brought back to do it. They became known as 'the Irish squad'. Their father, Charlie, held the fort at home and looked out for jobs for them." So it was that the company began, in 1913, with the work of a group of journeyman Irish steeplejack brothers.

Years later, home on one such job, John Rainey decided to stay and set up business in Belfast. His brother Charles and step-brother David Nocker - as well as their always-on-hand father, Charlie - worked with him in the early company.

"His was the first steeplejack business in Ireland," Des points out and Brendan adds, "at that time it was a very dangerous job. Safety wasn't what it is now. If you fell you didn't bounce so steeplejacks had to be very skilled and very careful."

All so far and so good - except for the dramas and sadnesses not incidental along the way in any family story. John Rainey's older brother Patrick died from a football injury on one of those trips home, playing against Crusaders in Antrim. Accidents, with camaraderie in steeplejacking at a premium, affected everyone. "The biggest fatality," Brendan says "didn't involve falls at all, ironically. It happened when the Tennents Brewery tower in Glasgow was being taken down in the late 1920s.

"Steeplejacks were doing the job piecemeal, those on top knocking and throwing the stone down inside the tower to be cleared out by the fellows below. But the stones compressed at the bottom and the chimney sat down and 11 of the men at the bottom were killed. My father remembered that very well."

His father remembered the Titanic too, how an uncle brought him to see it in dry dock. And how a half-brother, Hughie, joined up, went to fight in the Dardanelles, in Turkey in WWI and got much abuse about it from their father. John Rainey recalled how he learned to drive in Derry in the 1930s when a fellow steeplejack's rope broke and there being no other transport he, a non-driver, "jumped in a car and drove him to hospital". The man died.

John Rainey would also tell how, in the 1930s, he had to get a permit to work in the Republic. By then the company was being run by John and his father, Charlie who was, Brendan says, "more like his maintenance man." He was 40, and had built the business, when he married 19-year-old Mary Loughran.

The Loughrans had a pub in Gortin, not far from Omagh, purchased with money made in the Clondyke gold rush by Mary's grandfather. Mary met John when he arrived to work on Gortin church steeple. They reared their family on Somerton Road, Belfast.

John Rainey died six years ago at the age of 101.

Steeplejacks do a risky job carefully. From beginnings in the repair and maintenance of industrial chimneys and church steeples, the Rainey steeplejacking business grew in time to concentrate on stone conservation, maintenance and lightning protection. "We've worked on every cathedral in Ireland," Brendan says, not without pride. "We know the dimensions of stones used everywhere," Des adds.

Brendan says the company "took down in the region of 60 textile chimneys in the north in the 1970s. The mills were closing down, there were big UK grants for the work and we made a lot of money. There were never the same number of chimneys here, it was never so industrial. Power station chimneys here are mostly concrete - places like Great Island in Wexford and Tarbert in Kerry."

Proving that what goes around does indeed come around Brendan Rainey remembers "having to paint the swastika on the Swastika Laundry chimney in Ballsbridge about 35 years ago, white on a brown brick. Recently we were called in to repoint and conserve that same chimney when it was made part of the new development on the site.

"At the height of the Troubles in the north," he says, "we'd a really mixed, Catholic and Protestant, workforce. The nature of the job is a big leveller; working at those heights you have to get on. It's all about the work at those heights."

But it was as a consequence of the Troubles, and the effect on business, that Brendan and his father moved to expand things in this part of the country in 1973. "That first year, with just my father and myself and a fellow from Sean McDermott Street who worked for us, we'd a turnover of £69,000. That," he says proudly, "was great bucks!"

Safety measure changes in steeplejacking began some 20 years ago. "Manila ropes, for instance, went out of use because any kind of a chemical would burn through them and down you'd go, whoosh! Ropes are now made of polyproplyene and nylon. We've always trained our own men, improving standards as we went along. We send them on abseiling courses, which gives more flexibility.

"We've had men working for us for 40 to 50 years. The main thing is not about getting up, it's what to do when you're up there. You have to maintain and be very careful about equipment."

The company became predominantly involved with conservation work some 30 years ago and began training stone masons to be steeplejacks. "Our senior stone mason/steeplejack is Willie McErlean," Brendan says. "He's doing Blarney Castle at the moment."

Lightning protection, a large part of what they do is, according to Des, "a natural progression of steeplejacking".

The company has some 60 employees in the Republic (there is a second base in Cork) and about 25 in Northern Ireland.

With some of the founder's sons looking after things and a third generation on board and climbing in the person of Brian Rainey Jnr, a family future for J Rainey & Co looks assured.