Operating out of rural west Clare, McKenna Consulting Engineers have significant experience on a number of large structural engineering projects within the domestic sector. Building Ireland touched base with Managing Director Tomás McKenna to hear everything about the company – from its origins to the current state of business – and the project it has nominated at the upcoming Irish Construction Excellence Awards.
These are busy times at McKenna Consulting Engineers and the plan for Tomás McKenna and the rest of the team is to try and keep things that way right through to next year.
Established in 2010, the company currently employs seven full-time staff from its base in the Square, Miltown-Malbay, Co Clare and has ambitions to grow its business further.
Tomás McKenna heads up McKenna Consulting Engineers as its Managing Director and his wife Ciara is also part of the management as company director.
Building Ireland caught up with Tomás recently to find out more about the ins and outs of the business and the projects it has on-going at the moment.
“We’re predominantly structural engineers and we do a lot of work in the domestic sector,” he outlined.
“Obviously, being a domestic company, we have to keep our foot in local and smaller projects, but we’re involved in a large number of housing developments for local authorities at the moment.
“We have a large number of school projects on our books and we’ve taken on a number of projects where you upgrade older properties up to more usable facilities in the last couple of years.
“So, all in all, we’ve a wide variety of projects on the books.”
Tomás himself is a Chartered Civil and Structural Engineer with more than two decades of experience as a Site Engineer, Design Engineer and a Project Engineer on the planning, design and implementation of Civil and Structural Engineering projects throughout Ireland.
He started McKenna Consulting Engineers in the height of the last recession and, thankfully, hasn’t looked back since as the business has grown year on year.
“I worked in Dublin and Galway for a number of years and worked both in consultancies and on site,” said the MD.
“Back in 2006, I was working in a company in Ennis and got let go during the downturn in 2010 and at that stage it was a case of get on a plane and go to Australia or Dubai or somewhere, or try and make a go of it here.
“So, I started the business pretty much in my bedroom along with one of the lads I had been working with in Ennis, Shane Curtin, and between myself and Shane and my wife over time, we’ve grown the business from the bedroom to a place that had employed up to nine people and going quite successfully and earning a living in rural west Clare.”
As experienced engineers in a variety of different fields, the team in Miltown-Malbay has significant experience on a number of large structural engineering projects as well as sewerage, drainage and water distribution network systems and general site infrastructure.
Today, business is thriving with various projects currently on-going in different parts around the west of Ireland.
“Business has been very good, very steady,” Tomás stated. “Because we’re in west Clare, we travel a lot for our work. So, we have projects as far afield as Sligo, Athlone and have a lot of projects in Galway and a number in Limerick as well.
“We tend to travel a lot for our work. The Lahinch Leisure project was great for us because it was on our doorstep and it was one of those that we were passionate about and we got it.”
He added: “We have a number of housing schemes on the go with Galway County Council right now. We’ve completed work for Limerick County Council and we have a number of housing developments for Clare County Council at the moment.
“We have a large number of school projects in the Clare area and do a lot of commercial work in Galway, where we’re involved with a number of different architects.”
Last year saw McKenna Consulting Engineers completing works on the Lahinch Leisure Centre located at Promenade, Dough, Lahinch, Co Clare.
Having originally been constructed in the mid-1960s with additional modifications and extensions in the 1990s, the challenge on the project was to upgrade a building of its age and with varying construction types, to modern building standards and achieve A rated energy certification.
Refurbishment work on the building included a deep retrofit, upgrade of the fabric of the existing building including floors, walls, glazing and roofs to levels to achieve current building regulation u-values.
As lead consultants on the project, McKenna Consulting Engineers were responsible for the co-ordination of the upgrade works, including the structural assessment of the existing roofs to support the proposed solar arrays, additional levels of insulation and services. The company also designed the new learner pool and state of the art GYM Areas.
The construction process at Lahinch Leisure Centre commenced in September 2020 and the works were substantially completed in February 2022.
Since then, McKenna Consulting Engineers have been nominated at this year’s Irish Construction Excellence (ICE) Awards in the ‘Civil Engineering Under €10m’ category.
As Tomás outlined, this particular project was one that was close to home for him and his team.
“It was close to us and my kids would swim up there and use it and still do now,” he said.
“So, it was one that we wanted to make sure that we got right and put lot of time and effort into making sure that we were hands on with it and that the design and the final product was going to meet the standards, and what the clients had laid out to us in terms of what they were looking for.”
He added: “It encompassed a lot of the Covid period within that and that posed a lot of challenges for us in terms of contractors, people going down with Covid and that. Trying to keep the timelines was a challenge, but we had an excellent team and Tom McNamaras were the contract managers and the contractors were Jada Construction who were an excellent firm to work with as well.
“Again, local, which helped in all these because people had a vested interest in it and a lot of the people working in the project had kids and family that were going to be using the facility after. So, there was a push on people to make sure that it was done right.”
McKenna Consulting Engineers will find out on April 27th whether or not Lahinch Leisure Centre becomes an award-winning project along with everything else, with the annual ceremony set to take place at the Dublin Convention Centre.
As for the months ahead for the company, Tomás says he’s eager for it to take on more projects like the Lahinch Leisure Centre and continue the growing trend it has experienced over the past dozen years.
“We want to take on as many large-scale projects as we can, similar to Lahinch Seaworld and the housing developments.
“We want to continue to progress and build the company so that every time we do a large project, we’re in the running to get another. That, to be fair, has generally been how we’ve seen things.
“So, into the future we want to continue to grow the business, try and take on one or two additional staff if we can and hopefully go from strength to strength,” the Managing Director concluded.
McKenna Consulting Engineers
The Square,
Miltown-Malbay,
Co Clare
V95 F850
Tel: 065 708 5651
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.mckennace.com
This article was published in Building Ireland Magazine, July 2023, Vol 9 No 7
