Born April 23rd, 1940
Died November 25th, 2025
Nael Bunni, who has died aged 85, was a civil engineer who became one of the construction industry’s leading arbitrators, conciliators and adjudicators. A man of great integrity, adherence to the highest standards in his own professional life prompted a big personal upheaval which ultimately benefited many others.
From a practice in Dublin and as a door tenant with the construction specialising 39 Essex Chambers in London, he was involved in dispute resolution in over 50 jurisdictions. He authored the definitive volume Construction Insurance (later Risk and Insurance in Construction), which ran to multiple editions, as well as three editions of the International Federation of Consulting Engineers (Fidic) Form of Contract – both regarded as indispensable and foundation works in their field.
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He was a visiting professor in construction law in Trinity College Dublin, and for many years also lectured extensively internationally.
In 2018 he was awarded Fidic’s Louis Prangey Award, it is the highest recognition the organisation can award. In 2020 he received the Society of Construction Law’s president’s medal for what the presenter, the current president of the High Court, Mr Justice David Barniville, termed “a quite dazzling career”.
And all achieved from a beginning that might well have evolved otherwise, were it not for talent that emerged early.
Nael Bunni was born in Iraq 1940, into a small Christian family in Kirkuk, an ethnically diverse but Kurdish-dominated city in the northeastern part of the country. His father was a vet and, when Bunni was still a young child, the family moved to Hilla after Bunni senior was made head of a veterinary hospital there.
Hilla was an Arab-majority city in the mainly Shi’a dominated south-central Iraq. There, Bunni’s father convinced a local primary school to enrol his son, even though he was underage.
As Bunni’s son Layth recalled at his father’s funeral, “from there, Dad just flew and thrived. Year after year he came top in the annual exams. By 10, he’d finished primary school and moved on to secondary; by 15 he’d completed his final national exams.”
He went through life with a feisty courage, an absolute obsession with truth and justice, a complete sense of how he wanted his family to be and a very precise, logical mind
— Nael's son, Layth
Around this time, the family moved again, this time to the capital where Bunni was offered a place in the University of Baghdad studying engineering – a course for which he had the grades but, at 15, was too young by a year.
No matter, his father “adjusted” his birth certificate and Bunni was in.
He graduated in 1958 and secured a scholarship to study abroad. This was a time when many of his contemporaries looked to the Soviet Union for further education but Bunni chose Manchester, England. It was while there that he met his future wife, Anne Carroll from Dundalk, then working as a nurse and they married in 1962.
After obtaining his master’s in science in Manchester, Bunni went on to Queen Mary University in London to complete a PhD in structural engineering. As part of the study abroad opportunity, he had to return to Baghdad.
And so, in 1964, he and Anne bought a small Simca car, loaded it up with their belongings and, their first child, Nadia in hand, drove across Europe to Baghdad.
There, Bunni lectured as an assistant professor at Baghdad’s technical university, and also evaluated projects throughout the country for the construction insurance industry, and founded his own design firm. However, after Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist Party took over in 1968, Bunni came under pressure to fake evaluations, in a business and political culture dominated increasingly by kickbacks and corruption.
Many years later, Bunni recalled, for the Irish Life and Lore archive, how in Hussein’s Iraq, all people in senior positions had to do “whatever suited him”. On what he described a “horrible day” the point came when he was asked to submit a fraudulent valuation.
“I knew I’d have to leave,” he told interviewer Maurice O’Keeffe. “I was asked to pay ... for nothing and of course, once you do it, you are in their grip because you have cheated. If I had stayed, I would have faced prosecution, jail or even worse.”
Fortunately, Bunni’s wife and children – Nadia and newly arrived son, Layth, and a second daughter, Siobhán – were already in Ireland on holiday. He joined them, setting up home in Howth, where their other children – three more daughters, Lara, Layla and Lydia – were born.
In Ireland, Bunni began work as an engineer and in 1975 he received his first arbitral appointment and his career took him in that direction. Thus, for more than half a century, he was involved in construction dispute resolution, and was appointed arbitrator in more than than 150 cases in more than 50 jurisdictions.
His prowess as a space-frame analyst and designer was recognised by professional colleagues. His work on such three-dimensional structures, for a church in Kilbarrack and the Square centre in Tallaght, both won awards.
Other achievements and multiple appointments were enumerated by Barniville when presenting him with the Society of Construction Law award.
Apart from his own work as a consultant engineer, he served as president of the Association of Consulting Engineers of Ireland in 1980. He also served as chairman of the Irish branch of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, of which he was a founding member and, in 2000, as president of the worldwide Chartered Institute of Arbitrators.
In 2015 he was appointed by the government as chairman of the Ministerial Panel of Adjudicators, an acknowledgment of his achievements as it was made not through political connections but based purely on his experience as a dispute resolver.
For 13 years he was a member of the board of the London Court of International Arbitration and for more than a decade, was chairman of the dispute resolution panel of the Institute of Engineers of Ireland.
While Bunni was widely recognised professionally, his son said that “what mattered more [to him] was how he went through life – with a feisty courage, an absolute obsession with truth and justice, a complete sense of how he wanted his family to be and a very precise, logical mind”.
When their youngest child was two, Anne followed her husband into professional life. The former nurse studied law, was called to the Bar, and in 1996, became the first woman to chair the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators’ Irish branch. In the same year, she was appointed vice-chairwoman of the Employment Appeals Tribunal, serving until she reached retirement age in 2003. She died in 2020.
Nael Bunni is survived by his children, Nadia, Layth, Siobhán, Lara, Layla and Lydia, his sons-in-law, Paul, Nicola, Charlie, and Frederick, daughter-in-law Sarah Jane, 27 grandchildren and five great grandchildren.
