UCD Engineering Class of 1975 Celebrate

The UCD Engineering Class of 1975 celebrated their 40th reunion in the Shelbourne Hotel on Friday night last.  There were 65 former classmates in attendance from all over the world some of whom travelled from UK, other parts of Europe, Middle East, North America and Australia. Many had not seen their colleagues since graduation day on July 14th 1975! That was in Earlsfort Terrace for conferring at the time and when the UCD School of Engineering was then in Merrion St. - now the Taoiseach's Office in Government Buildings.

Ed Hanlon - Principal Organiser

The Reunion event was judged by attendees to be a great success organised to a huge extent by Eddie Hanlon supported by Colm Bannon and to a lesser extent myself.



We had the dinner tables in the Shelbourne appropriately named after former Professors and Lecturers in each discipline - Dooge, de Courcy and Dowley for Civil, Morrissey for Electrical, Timoney and McCabe for Mechanical and O'Donnell for Chemical.

I would not normally post an EGA blog on a particular UCD Engineering Class Reunion but this one was fairly unique in lots of ways - firstly 4 of the 12 UCD EGA Presidents to date came from the Class of 1975 - Colm Bannon Civil (1999 - 2001), Simon Kelly Mechanical (2004 - 2008), Michael Loughnane Electrical (2008 - 2012) and myself Civil (2012 - 2016).

4 EGA Presidents from Class of 1975
L to R: Simon Kelly, Michael Loughnane, PJ Rudden & Colm Bannon

Because we were all taught in UCD Merrion St, by kind permission of the Department of the Taoiseach we were given a specially organised guided tour of Government Buildings prior to dinner in the Shelbourne. We were very privileged that our guide for the tour was Marc McManus who has been in the Taoiseach's Office since 2001 and is highly informed on the recent history of Government Buildings.

Department of the Taoiseach, formerly UCD School of Engineering

We marvelled at the iconic refurbishment of the building that was once our UCD School of Engineering, now transformed by the OPW to meet the needs of Ireland's Head of Government, where Taoiseach Enda Kenny greeted Queen Elizabeth in May 2011. This was very fitting as the then Royal College of Science (later UCD) was opened in Summer 1911 by her grandfather King George V almost exactly 100 hundred years earlier.

 

The building was integrated into UCD in the 1920s. It became Irish Government Buildings in 1991 after UCD Engineering moved to Belfield (and partly back to Earlsfort Terrace for Civil Engineering and then later to Newstead Clonskeagh close to Belfield Campus where Civil currently remains).

Also notable visitors to the building in recent years were US President Clinton, South African President Nelson Mandela, British Prime Ministers Major, Blair and Cameron and other world leaders.

We greatly admired the Evie Hone window depicting 'The Four Green Fields' up the steps inside the front door, the Sycamore Meeting Room and the Government Press Centre where all major press conferences are held. We visited the once well-frequented canteen down the steps from the foyer which is now the Press Briefing Room. Oh the memories came flooding back ... 

Morrissey Table: (Front Row L-R) Paddy Cully, John Power and Brian Fitzsimons.
(Back Row L-R) Michael Loughnane, Paul Murphy, Niall O'Reilly and Niall Lynch.

Eddie Hanlon welcomed all his colleagues and especially thanked our Sponsors.  This were in alphabetical order - CRH, Clifton Scannell Emerson, ESB, FIMAK, Dirk Folens, Irish Cement, Mott McDonald, Nicholas O'Dwyer, O'Dwyer  Wines and RPS.  On behalf of UCD EGA, I thanked and congratulated Eddie Hanlon in particular and proposed a toast to UCD to which Professor Michael Bruen, School of Civil Engineering responded.



de Courcy Table: (Front Row L-R) Sean McCarthy, Colm Bannon and Gerard Dalton.
(Back Row L-R) Gerard McGuire, Peter Fagan, Gerry Noonan, Frank McGovern, Michael Bruen and Tom Duffy.

Michael thanked the organising committee and briefed us on developments in UCD College of Engineering since we graduated including the many organisational and accommodation changes affecting Civil and Biosystems Engineering in particular.



O'Donnell Table: (Front Row L-R) Ed Simpson, Chris Kelly and Alan Barrett.
(Back Row L_R) James O'Brien, Joe Watson, Aidan Daly, Joe Huggard, Derek O'Neill and Alan Dixon.

In my few words I addressed the variety of enterprise and events undertaken by the EGA.  We also cooperated with Engineers Ireland on launch of our Gender Balance Report last Autumn. The need for greater gender balance was not recognised in the 1970s and it still needs awareness raising with students, teachers and parents though the gender balance improved greatly in the 80s and 90s.   Only now do the public appreciate the critical role that Engineers play in 'making the world go round' in every sense from waking in the morning to day's end in terms of services we now take for granted -iPhones, Water, Energy, Transport, quality of Environment and so on.

Timoney Table: (Front Row L-R) Paddy Callaghan, Pat Connolly and Pat Murphy.
(Back Row L-R)  Donal Waddell, Simon Kelly, Declan Williams, John Finn, Henry Morris and Richard Berney.

I mentioned that for the first time UCD has a civil engineer President Professor Andrew Deeks and an electronics engineer as UCD Vice President Professor Orla Feely responsible for Research Innovation and Impact. I spoke briefly about the slow but sure economic recovery now impacting positively on job creation in engineering especially in the civil and construction areas which suffered severe recession until recently.

Dooge Table: (Front Row L-R) Joe Collins, Bernard Murray and David O'Flaherty.
(Back Row L-R) Tom Beglin, Ciaran de Bhaldraithe, Larry Wolohan, Ed Hanlon, Donal O'Dwyer and Jim Hayes.

We were very grateful to our many sponsor firms but special thanks goes to colleague Donal O'Dwyer who supplied the red wine from his Clara Valley vineyard in Adelaide, Southern Australia.

McCabe Table: (Front Row L-R) Liam Nugent, Dirk Folens and Russell Kelly.
(Back Row L-R) Pearse Buckley, Kevin Barry, Iggy O'Kane, Paul O'Duffy, Joe Byrne, Conor O'Donovan and Paul Dolan.

There was a further social event with partners on Saturday night in Oil Can Harry's in Mount Street and golf in Woodbrook on Monday.







Dowley Table: (Front Row L-R) PJ Rudden, Seamus O'Sullivan and Damien Treanor.
(Back Row L-R) John O'Rourke, Rick Crowe, Ciaran McGill, Martin Kelly, Frank Clarke and Sean Carey.