Killaloe in Co Clare is in the news this year on the 1,000th anniversary of the death in 1014 of High King Brian Boru, at the Battle of Clontarf. He ruled the country from his castle in Kincora. Killaloe was then the capital of Ireland. It was the capital of water skiing in the 1950s and 1960s when I lived there as a boy, a teenager and a young adult. And today it is arguably the capital of Ireland’s inland waterways. Killaloe, with its twin ‘heritage’ town Ballina in Co Tipperary, ...

The Central Library represents the biggest single investment by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council in a civic amenity. Under the 2004-2010 Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown (DLR) County Development Plan, the Central Library was envisaged as a crucial element of a programme of regeneration. The councillors agreed to proceed to an architectural competition and to make funding available for the Central Library at a meeting in 2006. The Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland (RIAI) organised and ran ...

  Drogheda – Ireland’s largest town, in Ireland’s smallest county. Its name as Gaeilge is An Droichead Átha – the bridge at the ford. Next week (Tuesday, 5 August RTE1 at 7pm), RTE's new series 'Building Ireland is in Drogheda because it has the finest railway bridge ever constructed in the country – the Boyne viaduct. “It’s one of Ireland's most ambitious examples of Victorian industrial engineering,” says presenter and chartered engineer Tim Joyce. Drogheda's iconic viaduct was ...

  From the architectural splendour of Dublin's Banking Halls to the longest Victorian railway tunnel in the country just five miles outside Cork City, a new six-part RTÉ series will examine the fascinating stories of how we went about ‘building Ireland’. Tim Joyce, a practising civil engineer who has long been closely involved with Engineers Ireland’s student maths tutorials, joins architect Orla Murphy and geographer Dr Susan Hegarty as part of Building Ireland's presenting team. As ...

The life and works of engineer Peter Rice (1935-1992) are being celebrated in a major exhibition running until 22 December. Hosted by the Office of Public Works and taking place in the Farmleigh Gallery in Dublin, ‘Traces of Peter Rice’ is part of a series of events being held in London and Paris, two cities in which Rice has had significant architectural impact. A native of Dundalk, Rice attended Newbridge College in Co Kildare before graduating from Queen’s University Belfast and ...

Speaker: John McKeown BSc (Hons) Dip PM Eur Ing CEng FIEI MICE, regional manager, Waterways Ireland Following years of neglect and disrepair, the reopening of the Royal Canal has breathed new life into one of the most important inland waterways in Ireland. Speaking at a presentation organised by the Heritage Society of Engineers Ireland, Waterways Ireland regional manager and chartered engineer John McKeown explained the major work that went into the restoration of the ...