Engineers Journal / News

Engineers Ireland’s Conservation Group announces new officers at AGM

Tuesday 19 December 2017

The Conservation Group, which is a subsection of the Structures Division, held their AGM in 22 Clyde Road on Friday 17 November and all the Officer posts in the Committee were put up for nominations. The new lineup is:

Chair : John Kelly
Vice Chair : Dermot Nolan
Secretary : Lisa Edden

A number of other duties were apportioned to members of the Committee. The outgoing Chair Tim Ryan briefly summarised the activities over the past two years which included two successful seminars held at Clyde Road and he welcomed the new appointments. The AGM discussed a possible programme for the year ahead. The first seminar organised by the Group was on timber conservation which was comprehensively informed by members of the Timber Research and Development Association. The second was on refurbishment and upgrading of historic buildings to improve energy performance and this had a variety of speakers who covered legal and access aspects and the awkward problems of conformity with Fire and Building Regulations. Both seminars were well attended. Other events covered ironwork and lime mortars and officers took part in and recorded other events and cooperations with IGBC, RIAI, BLFI, The Department of Arts, Heritage, Regional and Rural Affairs and the Gaeltacht and other organisations. The last two years have seen some brilliant candidates for the Engineers Ireland Excellence Awards for Conservation, but this year was outstanding with seven entries and all at a very high standard. It is clear that Conservation is a steadily increasing interest in the construction sector as recognition of embodied energy as well as recognition of the importance of heritage begin to combine. One of the objectives of the Group is to assist members in obtaining acceptance on the Conservation Accreditation Register for Engineers (CARE), which is steadily growing in the UK and to which we were able, this year, to add two more names to the short list of CARE members in Ireland, one of whom is the new Chair, John Kelly. The award of Accreditation involves deep scrutiny of case studies by a panel of engineers and is a considerable achievement Group discussions are lively and wide ranging and include experiences from both within and outside the country. We have a healthy, country-wide membership but there is room for more and we are open to all engineers who would wish to be included in our circulation. Please contact Lisa Edden at lisaedden@eircom.net At present, and possibly unavoidably, there is a slight Dublin bias to the membership so we would encourage prospective members from outside Dublin to apply to us. Tim Ryan is the outgoing Chair of the Conservation Group. [caption id="attachment_39297" align="alignleft" width="274"]