John Gerard Sisk, who died on March 11th aged 90, has been described as "the grand old man of the Irish construction industry".
Born just after the turn of the century, John Sisk is credited with transforming a small family-owned building company in Cork into the largest construction company in the State. He retired as chairman of the company in the mid-1970s.
He came from a line of Cork tradesmen, who were plasterers and carpenters, but his natural left-handedness was "beaten out of him", as was the misguided custom of the time. While he never practised the skills of the craftsman, he listened and learned, and gained an intimate understanding of the appropriate design and use of building materials. This complemented his academic training as an engineer to research and implement production techniques.
John Sisk attended Clongowes Wood College for four years in the 1920s, where he displayed a healthy interest in sport: the college magazine, Clongownian (1925), shows him as a member of the third-line hurling team.
He went to University College Cork at the unusually early age of 16 to study civil engineering. After graduating in 1932 as the youngest in his class, he became one of only two civil engineers in the State in the contracting business. Others were working in design offices or for local authorities and semi-State bodies.
Despite what might be considered to be a privileged background, he quickly set out to learn the craft of building, and developed lifelong passions for joinery, design and manufacture, and also for natural stone.
The family building firm had been founded in 1859 by his grandfather, John Sisk. It was mainly a Cork-based business, which occasionally built elsewhere in Ireland, including the parish churches in Nenagh, Co Tipperary, in 1896 and Newport, Co Mayo, in 1917.
At the time John Sisk graduated, the centre of Cork was being rebuilt after the "Troubles" and his first major contract was the construction of City Hall.
During the Depression of the 1930s, which was exacerbated by the economic war, the Sisk business found times difficult, and John Sisk decided to move to Dublin with his young bride Molly (nee Cooney) and his cousin, Herbert Dennis.
Breaking into the closed ranks of Dublin commercial circles was no easy task for the fledgling company. But John Sisk persevered and was successful in building up a steady business that was able to ride through the peaks and troughs that have always plagued the construction industry.
When work became scarce in Dublin in 1942, John Sisk built US army camps in Derry and Fermanagh. But it was the 1950s that proved to be the most dynamic period for the company he was building up. Rather than expand into the UK, he looked to continental Europe for new opportunities to expand. This resulted in the creation of Beaver Distribution and the Ascon civil engineering joint venture with the Dutch group Hollandsche Beton.
While John Sisk & Sons was engaged in a wide range of construction projects, it was the building of two cathedrals in Ireland that gave John Sisk his greatest satisfaction. He was responsible for the Catholic cathedrals in Cavan and Galway. He was also responsible for the construction of the Catholic cathedral in Mutare in Zimbabwe, which left him with a great love of Africa and its people.
In 1974, he retired, but his involvement in business did not end. Despite his dislike of committees, he was persuaded to become a non-executive director of Allied Irish Banks, the first representative of the building industry to join the board of Ireland's biggest bank. He remained a director of AIB for five years.
Known as "the boss", John Sisk described himself as less of a businessman than that of an engineer. He attributed many of his initiatives and achievements to happy accidents and to being able to quickly establish long-lasting trust with like-minded individuals. He was slow to open up to strangers, but when he did establish a rapport that relationship would be maintained.
Privately, he contributed generously to charitable causes, but he thoroughly disliked ostentation and avoided high-profile charity fund-raising events.
His sporting passion was sailing - he was a member of the Royal Irish Yacht Club - but not competitively as he felt he had enough challenges in his work. He was also interested in walking, beagling, sketching and industrial design.
John Sisk is survived by his daughter, Hope, sons, George, Hal and John, and sister Feena. His wife, Molly, pre-deceased him.
John Gerard Sisk: born 1911; died, March 2001