The Builder Blog

The Builder Blog – it was bound to come up sometime, so let’s get it over with!

Week two of Thirteen was a hive of activity. As if, by telling people I was taking in lodgers they were galvanised into action with me. Most surprisingly, some of the builders I’ve been trying to track down for two years showed up. At last, Wexford builder returned and I got a bit of felt and flashing laid where a leak persisted, and with Noddy having done all the handle work and screw fixing, I was running out of jobs by the time Mayo builder phoned to say he was ten minutes away. I found a towel rail hanging askance; just to make the trip worth his while.

These odd jobs are rewarded with pots of tea and mince pies. But most of all it’s the chats in the kitchen that we’ve had over the years that bind us (and provided great material for my novel). I’ve worked with all sorts of builders, as a project manager or a designer, where there’s a planning and management skill and there’s also one other essential, unteachable skill, begging. I invoked that more than anything during the building heyday.

Now they ask me have I any work going, not for a while I should think. Nor will it ever return to the way it was, thankfully. I could never understand where the money was coming from, how people were driving brand new cars and buying multiple properties. I thought I must be doing something wrong; working very hard and yet just keeping up, knowing intuitively that it couldn’t be sustained, but the ‘experts’ knew better – even without a degree in finance I knew the price paid for the Irish Glass Bottle site could never stack up. Developers – and city planners - thought they could make Ringsend into Chelsea, Ballsbridge into Knightsbridge. We’re not London and never will be, we were once the most graciously planned city in the British Isles, now let’s just hope we can keep the city alive and rents get real.

One of the first people to have the vision and see the potential of adapting old disused buildings for a grown-up gritty night out was the late Hugh O’Regan, sadly one of the recent casualties of this era and a great loss. Another visionary, Jay Bourke, whose Cafebardeli chain went down, introduced the best casual eating experiences of our time, cool, urban, healthy and, again in historic buildings, gently and creatively adapted.  Of course, they, like many, many others were lent too much money and nobody knew when to stop.