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In an old city, if you want to put something up,
you’ve got to take something else down. The companies doing that tend to avoid the limelight: though you’ll see Ronan and John Paul and Arup flashing their names on hoardings all over Dublin, Hegarty is a much more modest organisation. Its teams helped rebuild Croke Park, created the Twitter HQ, carted off the old ESB building on Fitzwilliam Street and are currently revamping the Central Bank, but all of their operations are run out of an unremarkable terraced house in Rathfarnham. Paul Hogan is currently a director at Hegarty, but he’s been with the company a long time, and started out young. “I came in during the summers as a tea boy while I was still at school, to get a few quid. When I went to University in Galway studying engineering I used to work summers here, and I gravitated back to demolition. The guys who were running this company always looked for qualified people, professional engineers. “It’s dangerous, specialist work, so it’s good to have people who have proven qualifications, or have proven themselves. We have foremen who’ve been with us for 30 or 40 years, and you can’t buy experience like that. You’re not going to learn demolition from a textbook - you need to learn it on the job. In Boland’s Mills, we walked in and went holy f**k, how are we going to tackle this? We were worried about things falling into the dock, which ran on one side. So, the solution we came up with was to get barges from Irish Water – square barges that could be clipped together – and then we got 100 mattresses off Mattress Mick, and we put three layers of them on the barges to cushion anything in case it fell. “Nine times out of ten when we walk into a building it’s like the Marie Celeste – there’s a half empty cup of coffee and the paper still open on the desk from five or ten years ago. In Boland’s Mills, when we took the top off the silos, some of them were half full of flour that had been there 15 or 20 years and was still perfect. I don’t know how the rats hadn’t eaten it. And when we had everything knocked and were digging, we kept coming across bricks buried everywhere, and then a big circle of bricks in the ground. It was a mystery why they were there, but when we checked the old photos from the 19th century we saw a huge chimney standing there. They’d pulled the chimney over and just left the bricks and built on top of them. “The old wrecking ball is gone, and nowadays we use high reach machines, which were a bit of a game changer. We scaffold three sides and then tackle the building from the top down, piece by piece, like the opposite of the way it went up. We use munchers and crushers to pulverise the concrete. We take out the rebar and it goes away for recycling, and we recycle the concrete as well. I don’t know how they get away with it in the US – dynamite and a big mushroom cloud going up. If you were doing that here you wouldn’t be in business. “We actually do a lot of conservation work too. In Boland’s, we took the roof and the floors out, but we put the cast iron columns back in, and we repaired and reinstalled the roof trusses and put a Welsh slate roof back on it. Some of the better examples of the machinery we took away and saved, and only this week it’s gone back into the conservation buildings there. Everyone now knows Boland’s was a mill, but in 30 years’ time they might not, so it’s good to keep the former use of the site alive. “Demolition comes in cycles. We were down to very low numbers during the last recession, but we’re back to 200 now. Back then there was a lot more variety in it, but now there’s a big focus on offices. We did Apollo House, and we’re just finishing College House beside it. The next one for the chopping block will be the old Department of Health building, and we’ll be hoping to do that once the tender’s out. Brian Hogan, the architect who designed a lot of those 60s buildings – we’re chasing him around town. We have foremen that were involved in the building of some of these and now they’re pulling them down to get ready for the next ones. “The original ESB demolition of the 1960s would never be permitted now, and nowadays we do a lot of facade retention. But the ‘60s and ‘70s stuff, there’s not much sentiment about it – most people aren’t mad about those precast concrete structures. When you see them all laid out, some of them are nice, but that’s not a decision for me to take. Ultimately it’s business for us.” ➝ hegartydemolition.ie THE KNOCKERS Hegarty Demolition 24