Builder gets to keep up disputed banner

jd

From the Indo
"
Builder gets to keep up disputed banner



THE managing director of a construction firm was granted a temporary injunction by the High Court yesterday, preventing Dublin City Council from removing a controversial No to Nice banner from his premises at Lower Ormond Quay beside the Millennium Bridge.


The order was granted to Michael Wallace, managing director of M and J Wallace Ltd, and the company.


The council issued a notice late on Friday stating that if the banner was not removed by noon yesterday, they would remove it. The banner says: "No to War, No to Nice and No to American Terrorism."


It was submitted that because of the forthcoming referendum, the banner was an exempted advertisement and did not endanger the facade at Ormond Quay."

I may not necessarily agree with the guy about Nice, but fair dues to him (and not just because he's from Wexford too)..
I like the fact that he is in the construction business, but is still willing to make public what could be perceived as anti establishment views..

PH01

No to War, No to Nice and No to American Terrorism.

What else is this guy saying 'No' to that has nothing to do with the Nice Treaty?
"No to the minimum wage";
"No to Brickies wanting more money";
"No to Building Regulations";
"No to the Green Belts";
"No to building deadlines";
...gawd the list could go on...

jd

Originally posted by PH01

What else is this guy saying 'No' to that has nothing to do with the Nice Treaty?
"No to the minimum wage";
"No to Brickies wanting more money";
"No to Building Regulations";
"No to the Green Belts";
"No to building deadlines";
...gawd the list could go on...

I think he had people before profit, believe it or not...

PH01

Originally posted by jd
I think he had people before profit, believe it or not...

Well then they're probably the only builders in the world who don't think of profit first.

gandalf

He's obviously not a member of the FF yes vote elite then.

Gandalf.

dathi1

He obliviously understands the concept of Power downgrade under Nice and its direct implications on our economy. Construction is always the first hit in any downturn.

FF's Nice whip Dick Roche on Nice after we voted No last year.


No to Nice again on Saturday.

mike65

I heard the builder on LiveLine a week or two back when someone complained about the banner, while its true its his space, he sounded like a very confused man, I mean
a builder who was willing to piss-off potential clients?

He's either fool or very sincere! Or both...

Mike.

jd

From the Sunday times..
(BTW his banner does say people before profit...)

Constructing ways to win his argument
Mick Wallace is an unlikely council agitator — or indeed property developer — but he is ready to battle for his beliefs



OUTSIDE Court 12, Mick Wallace is standing in a huddle with his lawyers.
If it weren’t for the copy of The Guardian under his arm, those of us who tend to judge a book by its cover might assume the builder’s companions are a free legal-aid team tasked with keeping a scruffy miscreant from serving time at minister McDowell’s pleasure.

Plaster-stained jeans, frayed grey sweatshirt, trademark grey-blond corkscrew hair — semi-tamed thanks to a pink towelling tieback — Wallace might fit a visual stereotype of a potential criminal.

However, a few steps closer and one will notice that Wallace is talking animatedly to a rapt audience. His lawyers listen, wait and respond in a way that they don’t tend to do when they are waiting on the court steps with Johnny Joyrider.

Wallace is using his own money — and he has quite a bit — to fight Dublin city council’s attempts to get him to remove a huge banner fronting on to Dublin’s North quays.

The banner proclaims: “No to War. No to Nice. No to American terrorism.”

For a man in the middle of a €10m project, and who heads a building operation that employs 50 people and has an annual turnover of more than €6m, it is an unusually radical statement.

For a man who counts that very same city council as his largest customer, his action might be interpreted as suicidal, at best foolhardy. That is not the way Wallace sees it.

This is a man who freely describes the Construction Industry Federation as a “glorified golf club”.

This is a man who enjoys wine, has a Turin apartment for his monthly Serie A football jaunts and yet describes contemporary Irish society as “obsessed with money and snobbishness”.

Wallace’s opinions make him unusual. But these opinions, coupled with his reputation as an extremely successful and highly visible businessman, make him a very rare bird indeed.

Wallace’s battle with the city council rests on a simple question: whether or not buildings can be adorned with political messages during an election or referendum. Wallace says yes they can, the council says no they can’t.

Wallace counters this by saying the constitutional right to free speech is endangered by such alleged muzzling from the council. The fight goes on.

And the fight really is just that. It’s not about the war. Wallace is using his dough to battle for the hearts and minds of a population he regards as blinded by the self-interest of the corporate world.

Last Tuesday, when Wallace was finished with due legal process for another day (another adjournment), we seek somewhere quiet to put down on paper the thoughts of this hirsute thorn in the side of Dublin’s unthinking corporate disciples. I suggest a meeting at the Morrison hotel. “I won’t be let in,” he says. I look to see whether he is joking. He is, after all, in the middle of building a new street next to the hotel.

He’s not joking, but he is let in. A friendly waiter minces to our service and puts €5 worth of black coffee in front of us (two cups), the tape goes on and Mick Wallace — builder, anti-corruption firebrand, educational theorist and political agitator — cuts loose.

He grew up the son of a builder. When he went to University College Dublin, the family company, M&J Wallace, was beginning to become a building firm of some substance. At the time Mick was immersed in studies for a degree in philosophy, English and history. “I was like a f****** sponge,” he recalls. “I wanted knowledge. All of it. I studied eight hours a day and that wasn’t enough.”

A career in academia could have beckoned but Wallace also wanted a social life.

He wanted to live a little. Have sex. Smoke a few joints. Let loose.

The one incident that led him away from the path of dedicated learning occurred when he was asked to debate the existence of God with a Jesuit in front of a bunch of schoolboys in Ranelagh.

“I went in convinced I had the learning and knowledge to take on this guy. I tried for eight hours but I had to give up.”

He laughs at the memory.

“Jesus, those Jesuits. Here was this man who had so much knowledge. Even if I had studied all day, every day for 20 years I would be lucky to have got where he was.”

As the possibility of a life dedicated to learning receded, Wallace did a higher diploma and, for a while in the early 1980s, taught.

At this stage he had met his wife — from whom he is long-since separated — and he frankly admits that the money was just too appalling to consider staying a teacher. What followed was the classic tale of the peripatetic Paddy builder — America, Canada, then Britain.

In 1989 he revived his late father’s business name — M&J Wallace — and struck out on his own with one other man.

By the mid 1990s, his reputation for quality jobs led him to a successful stint as a sub-contractor doing council and corporation work.

Then he got tired of leaving a middleman with the cream.

“I did Nassau Street, Balfe Street, St Stephen’s Green, and Winetavern Street as a sub-contractor. Then I priced a job up on Blackhorse Avenue and I got it. Since then we’ve done a lot of business for the council and they know that we do it properly.

“We work hard and if there’s anything wrong we come back and fix it even if it takes two f****** weeks to fix.

“Civil (jobs in public areas on behalf of civic authorities) is the best type of building. It’s either right or it isn’t. In general building you can get away with murder. It has to be right in civil, otherwise there’s trouble. That’s why there’s fewer people involved. It’s a more precise science.”

A science that suits Wallace construction. Since the dawn of the boom, Wallace and his troops have cut a familiar swathe through the city, as every inch of pavement seemed to be torn up and redone.

“I’ve won the best of jobs — on merit.” He has, nevertheless, “no problem in saying that the construction industry is a very dishonest industry in general”.

And what form does the dishonesty take? “Cheating. Cutting corners and doing things as cheaply as possible. That’s dishonesty.”

While Wallace’s public business continues to thrive, he has completed, or is in the process of completing, other smaller deals, including a small housing development in Rathgar.

He is highly amused at the frequent description of himself as a “property developer”. “The fact is people regard me as a member of the establishment. A builder. A developer. An employer.”

For a “member of the establishment” Wallace has an unlikely private life.

His eldest sons, both of whom were expelled from school for smoking cannabis, work for Wallace construction and live in the impressive house Wallace built for himself in Clontarf.

He has two younger children from his relationship with a girlfriend and spends a lot of his free time as coach to the Wexford under-14 and under-16 soccer teams. Soccer, as the football logo on the side of the Wallace construction fleet attests, is a passion.

Ever the purist, the flat in Turin allows him to see calcio played at its most sublime in the Stadio Del Alpi and sample some of his favourite wines.

When the brouhaha over Nice settles, it would be wrong to think Mick the militant will be going away. He has a whole list of passionate causes with which he is ready to batter the complacent politicians and smug citizenry. “It probably doesn’t really help the business end of things. But I find the fact that people don’t understand what is really happening annoys the f*** out of me.” What is really happening then? “There’s no morals whatever in politics. It’s pathetic. It’s all a game. There wasn’t a word about Iraq last February. Not a word. It started up bit by bit. By September it was ‘Ah Jesus, we have to bomb them now’.” However, as befits his erstwhile career as an amateur philosopher, it is on the broad subjects that Wallace becomes most profound. “I used to have pigs. We are like pigs. You put 10 pigs in a pen and there will be a few fights and a lot of tears and blood, but afterwards it will be accepted that there will be only one pig with power. It’s no different with humans.” Wallace now launches an evolutionary psychology debate tracing the rise of the powerful human domain from cave to clan to castle to province to country to globalised economy. All of which brings the discussion round to the societal ills of contemporary Ireland. “If there was more education — real education — we would care more about those less well off. The majority of schooling is now job preparation rather than life preparation. “People should be taught to think for themselves and to care for others. I’m not talking about communism. “We can work in a private enterprise environment and reward hard work, but we need to start to think for ourselves a bit more. “Look at privatisation. Has that worked? No. Do we need competition? Yes. But nobody has come up with a way to both protect the public ownership of assets and allow competition to flourish. We’re being fooled. “Just talking to people in Ireland today you can tell by their attitude which section they come from, public or private. They think that they are born to f****** rule and there’s a hidden curriculum in these private schools.” But c’mon. UCD. Son of a builder. Aren’t you a bit of a middle-class boy yourself? He bristles. “Having a business background is a privileged position. I accept that. I had an unfair advantage over the fella from Ballymun. But if I had a child who wanted to go to private school, I’d drown him.” Who’d have believed it? A wealthy Irish businessman espousing enough street cred to become a student bedsit pin-up.

a5y

jd wrote: »

“Just talking to people in Ireland today you can tell by their attitude which section they come from, public or private. They think that they are born to f****** rule and there’s a hidden curriculum in these private schools.” But c’mon. UCD. Son of a builder. Aren’t you a bit of a middle-class boy yourself? He bristles. “Having a business background is a privileged position. I accept that. I had an unfair advantage over the fella from Ballymun. But if I had a child who wanted to go to private school, I’d drown him.” Who’d have believed it? A wealthy Irish businessman espousing enough street cred to become a student bedsit pin-up.

Sorry to bring up a necro thread, but Wallace just got voted in, first round.

If I come back when I emigrate, I might just move to Wexford.

AlekSmart

Sorry to bring up a necro thread, but Wallace just got voted in, first round.

Don`t apologize at all a5y,probably the best result of Dail31 in my opinion.

Jeepers,the amount of times I drove along Suffolk St to see Mick W`s Builders backside sticking up as he got stuck in to some paving job,now it aint often ye get to say that about a politician !!!

Hope the Dail does`nt dull his enthusiasm ?

Eliot Rosewater

Please don't post in zombie threads. There is a thread in the GE forum about Wallace already. Locked.

/mod.