McAlpine’s Fusiliers to Carrillion and Beyond

McAlpine’s Fusiliers

TO CARRILLION AND BEYOND

Irecall reading an account of the scenes at the railway station in Roscommon town throughout the 1950s. Day after day men would line up on the platform, their cardboard cases at their feet, waiting for the trains. As it happens, my father was one of those men.

In recent years I have had the pleasure to meet the author Ultan Cowley who wrote a book chronicling this era namely The Men Who Built Britain. One particular account in the book recalls the labour agent arriving at the station and putting a tag on the men’s coats similar to how you would tie a parcel. The name of the builder and the man’s destination was on the tag. Thousands of men left Roscommon and many other Irish towns in this way.

This story is familiar to all who still remember the 1950s and the devastation caused by enforced emigration. The numbers remain hard to absorb, the distress harder still.

In 1955 48,000 people left Ireland. By 1957 the number had risen to 58,000. And in 1961 as many people were leaving as were born. I can still remember the shock I felt the first time I read those words. Even conservative estimates would suggest that close to 500,000 people left Ireland during that bleak decade.

That is 8 out of every 10 children born between 1931 and 1941. Out of those 8 at least 6 went to England - the men to the building sites and gas pipelines and the women to the hospitals and hotels. A generation of those men became known as McAlpine’s Fusiliers as they ended up working for Alfred McAlpine.

Alfred McAlpine plc was a construction firm headquartered in Cheshire and a major road builder; constructing over 10% of Britain’s motorways during the motorway building program in the 60s, when the company became a leading civil engineer in the UK. How many of those roads would exist in their current form without the hard work of Irish emigrants?

What is remarkable is that Alfred McAlpine no longer exists as it was purchased in 2008 by Carrillion which itself famously went into liquidation in January 2018 in the largest trading insolvency in UK history.

However, what is not so remarkable, and a source of great pride to all of us associated with the UK construction industry, is that the names that now dominate the sector are Irish. Murphy Group, Danny Sullivan, Laing O’Rourke, J Coffey…it’s a long list, and we are proud to work with many of them at BITA.

We at Evans Mockler are acutely aware of the hard-fought heritage that has been established by the previous generation and I am proud of my father’s contribution to that effort. I am also delighted to be on the board of BITA as we assist the companies that are still building Britain and rising to the top of the industry.

Although we work with businesses across all sectors, in London especially, construction will always have a special place in our hearts, as the Irish are inextricably linked with it.