John Sisk & Son was the big winner at the 2018 Irish Construction Excellence (ICE) Awards in the Mansion House, Dublin in March when its stunning delivery of the spectacular Pairc Ui Chaoimh project in Cork was named Project of the Year. We touched base with Regional Manager Dave Cotter to find out more about how Sisk brought this landmark €70m project across the line.
Friday, March 23rd, 2018 … a night to remember for John Sisk & Son as they scooped four prestigious awards – including the overall Project of the Year for Pairc Ui Chaoimh – at the Irish Construction Excellence Awards.
Cork GAA’s new Headquarters had already collected Best Project Award in the Leisure & Tourism category, while Luas Cross City was voted Best Project in the Civil Engineering category and Sisk also won the BIM Excellence Award for their use of BIM on a recent data centre project for a multinational client.
Sisk had been nominated in six categories in total, with Earlsfort Terrace, Baggot Plaza and their Health, Safety and Wellbeing initiative with DePuy all shortlisted and well represented on the night at the gala dinner and celebration of Irish construction excellence.
To complete a magnificent award-winning weekend, Pairc Ui Chaoimh picked up another award at the Irish Concrete Society Awards the following night – a further testament to the quality of all the elements of this project as a great showpiece for John Sisk & Son’s commitment to building excellence.
Crowned the Best Main Contractor to Work With at the 2017 Construction Enquirer awards, John Sisk & Son is a fifth generation, family-run Irish construction company with a turnover of more than €1bn and domestic operations in Ireland, Northern Ireland, England, Wales and Scotland as well as international operations in Europe and the United Arab Emirates.
Established in Cork in 1859, John Sisk & Son was awarded the contract to redevelop Pairc Ui Chaoimh in November 2015, having previously successfully delivered landmark projects with the redevelopment of the GAA’s flagship facility, Croke Park (four phases over a twelve-year period), as well as the construction of the all-new Aviva Stadium.
The regeneration of the stadium has resulted in a multipurpose floodlit bowl-shaped arena that can accommodate a capacity of 45,300 for games (47,000 for concerts) including 21,300 seats under cover. It also comprises a second all-weather playing pitch and landscaped spaces to cater for different activities on match and non-match days. Páirc Uí Chaoimh is now an impressive modern facility situated on the banks of the river Lee, providing a wonderful player and spectator experience.
The stadium was reopened in July, 2017 and was instantly heralded as a masterpiece – one of the most striking and modern stadiums in Europe, superbly constructed, with stunning aesthetics and making maximum use of space. In short: a no-expenses-spared, industry-leading facility that Cork GAA and the general public on Leeside can be proud to call home.
John Sisk & Son Regional Manager Dave Cotter served as construction project manager on the redevelopment. While one could easily forgive a company of the scope and scale of John Sisk & Son to take winning major award after major award for granted, he points out that this is most certainly not the case. To the contrary, their success at the ICE awards is greatly cherished:
“This is genuinely a big deal for us,” he confirms. “The project also won the Engineering Ireland Project of the Year Award recently, which was another huge accolade. We were up against strong competition from a lot of different sectors, as it was an engineering award as opposed to a construction one, so we were delighted with that and of course with the Irish Construction Excellence Award too.
“We take these awards very seriously. This is reflected in the fact that our MD attended the ICE awards and we took four tables on the night, where we had six nominations. It was great to be nominated, never mind to win, and it serves to generate more interest in Sisk and what we are doing as well as recognising the high standards of excellence that are present throughout the company.
“This was a landmark project for all of us. There will probably only be one or two of those in your career and these are the ones that you can look back on with the greatest pride after you have retired. I’d worked extensively in the pharmaceutical sector, which is more fit-out than structural, but this was a much bigger challenge – a very complex build with a tight timeframe and 550 men on site at the peak of a 19-month schedule. We feel that we achieved a lot in a short space of time.
“As the stadium will be used by the public and seen by the public, it’s a great opportunity for us to showcase what we are all about, so it’s very special. Also, the fact that it’s Cork was special. As we are originally a Cork-based company. We’ve completed a number of landmark projects in Cork before – such as County Hall and Cork School of Music – and Pairc Ui Chaoimh presented another opportunity for John Sisk & Son to show what we can do in the Cork region.
“As a complex structure, we brought a lot of innovation to it and that helped us from A Health & Safety point of view and from a schedule point of view as well as from a quality perspective. The quality of finish really is second to none. We used a lot of precast concrete but you can’t differentiate between the precast and the in-situ works.”
Visually, the stadium flows seamlessly and represents a true crowning glory for main contractor John Sisk & Son as well as the 75 subcontractors enlisted during the course of the project. Sisk has proven to be the perfect partner for Cork GAA and the accolades and awards are flooding in…
“We were able to draw upon our expertise of delivering both Croke Park and the Aviva,” Dave concludes. “We knew Pairc Ui Chaoimh was going to happen so we were chasing it was two years before it came to tender. We knew we had the expertise to build this stadium because we had already completed the two largest ones in Ireland. We have experienced personnel who had worked on largescale industrial projects in the UK and we came up with a plan to deliver the Pairc Ui Chaoimh project. We also carried out a comprehensive value engineering exercise at tender to get the budget down to assist the client.”
All the boxes were ticked and the results have been staggering, as acknowledged at the 2018 Irish Construction Excellence Awards.
Taken from Building Ireland Magazine, July 2018, Vol 4 No 6
