Awards for Construction Management Excellence

Monday June 13 2011

On Friday night I was a guest at the Annual Construction Manager of the Year Awards hosted by The Chartered Institute of Building in Dublin. CIOB was founded in 1834 and have over 47,000 members in 100 countries throughout the world.

The shortlisted finalists were all young professionals who had excelled in the building of some of Dublin's iconic new landmarks - The National Convention Centre, The Criminal Courts of Justice and Aviva Stadium built by contractors/ project managers CPM, Hegarty and Sisk respectively. These outstanding structures will forever be remembered as the last great building investments in the city before the construction and property crisis hit us in the late Aughties.

The Gold Medal for Construction Manager of the Year went to Donal McCarthy of CPM who project managed The National Convention Centre in Dublin. The Green Building Award went to Paul Stewart of JSL Group Ltd of Galway for the Roscommon Decentralised Government Offices.

The National Convention Centre beside the equally iconic Samuel Beckett Bridge over the River Liffey by Dublin City Council represent a new urban vista of which this generation of design professionals can be truly proud.

They are also very solid reminders that Dublin has a new freshness in Urban Design that should help its pitch led by City Architect Ali Grehan to become World Design Capital 2014. The Samuel Beckett Bridge led by City Engineer Michael Phillips won the Project Excellence Award from Engineers Ireland in 2010. Michael is also our Senior Vice President this year.

Not surprisingly the Samuel Beckett Bridge is increasingly used pictorially and graphically to symbolise and promote the modern Dublin in tourism and business advertising.

There were many other Construction Managers honoured for buildings all over Ireland - The O2 Dublin, McClay Library Queens Belfast, Iontas NUI Maynooth, Internal Street GMIT, Royal Hibernian Academy Dublin, St Patricks Hospital Cork, North South Ministerial Offices Armagh and Trauma and Orthopedic Theatres at Craigavon Hospital - an excellent North-South and regional spread of winners.

Sadly many of the country's once largest builders like McNamara and Pierse and who featured highly in the awards of previous years are no longer with us - further signs of the challenge we all now face to rebuild the construction industry in the years ahead. I'm confident though that we can engineer our way out of this recession through a combination of increasing competitiveness, innovation into new skill sets and services, common sense and hard work.

Also present as guests at the event were the President of the Construction Industry Federation Matt Gallagher, President of the Society of Chartered Surveyors John Curtin and the Dean of Engineering at DIT Dr Mike Murphy.

This event also reminded me that the new Built Environment in our cities - both townscape and landscape - will stand us well for generations and hopefully even centuries to come. It will endure as part of the future Ireland. No matter how dark the days may now seem for the construction industry, a new dawn will surely come later this decade and we all hope a great deal sooner. Then we will start to  rebuild on the truly great traditions which we are now honouring at events like these.