Ireland has some of the largest and best equipped stone companies in the British Isles, but with a home population of only 4million they have always looked overseas for sales. And with the recession at home they are now looking even harder.

Ireland has some of the largest and best equipped stone companies in the British Isles, but with a home population of only 4million they have always looked overseas for sales. And with the recession at home they are now looking even harder.

There might be 70million people in the world of Irish descent but only 4.2million of them actually live in the Republic (or did during the 2006 census). And that was the first time the country’s population had exceeded 4million in a century. About a quarter of the Republic’s population live in the City and County of Dublin, half-a-million of them in the City itself.

For a small country, the Irish stone industry has had quite an impact on its larger neighbour of the UK. Buoyed by Eurobillions for a decade from the middle of the 1990s that enabled them to obtain grants towards investment as well as boosting demand for their products, quarry companies and stone processors in Ireland invested heavily in machinery and a lot of it was bought from the British representatives of Italian manufacturers. A strong pound also meant Ireland looked economical in terms of processing stone, especially as it was using the latest high productivity machinery, and stone was sent there for processing for the UK market, which was also booming.

Then, in 2007 recession hit – ahead of the UK’s but not unrelated to it – as the credit crunch began to be felt. The population stopped growing, house prices fell and people who had taken out mortgages seven times their salaries suddenly found themselves with negative equity. It was time to pay for credit-financed lifestyles.

The UK has always sent a relatively large amount of stone to Ireland, some of it simply for processing and return to the UK. But the recession has inevitably hit trade between the two countries.

According to HM Revenue & Customs, the Sterling value of Ireland’s stone exports to the UK have fallen 25% since 2007 to just over £2million worth and the value of the UK’s exports to Ireland by 35% to £7.2million. The volume of UK exports has fallen 60%, so British companies would appear to be using the weakness of the pound against the Euro for their own benefits rather than dropping prices to Irish customers.

Apart from the re-export of imported stone, the most likely stone to be making its way across the Irish Sea in the direction of the UK is the Irish Blue limestone, extracted from an area around 50 miles south-west of Dublin. It is particularly appreciated for hard landscaping projects. The three producers of the stone are Stone Developments in Co Carlow and Co Kilkenny and McKeon Stone and Kilkenny Limestone in Co Kilkenny.

They already sell their stone to Holland and Belgium, where its density and strength earn it the name of Petit Granit that is used for paving, cills, door and window frames and house boundary steps. With the home market quiet they are all now looking for more export markets, including the UK.

Stone Developments are well established in the British market, with Pat Conlon representing them across the country from his base in Berkshire.

McKeon Stone (whose Threecastles quarry is pictured on the right of this page) have also been promoting to export markets including the UK to compensate for the fall in sales at home.

This year has marked a push into the UK market by Kilkenny Limestone, who are currently supplying their stone to a project in London and another near Liverpool in conjunction with their public realm partners in the UK, Marshalls.

Kilkenny Limestone market themselves under the banner of ‘Premium Product – Affordable Price’ and promote an entry level for their brand at less than £30/m2 retail in Ireland. They say trade prices are offered at a considerable discount. Feedback from the UK is that Ireland is often seen as a home nation – for example it is closer to Liverpool than London is. Kilkenny say a high level of automation, including a paving line, gives them the price advantage.

There is also a Kilkenny Black limestone, from which Kilkenny Castle is built, and another dark limestone called Galway Black.

Another Irish stone that is exported is the highly variegated decorative green marble from Connemara on the far west of Ireland. It is valued for its decorative nature, although it is often considered too decorative for today’s tastes in Ireland and the UK, not to mention being expensive.

It is a true, fully metamorphosed marble that straddles the Pre-Cambrian and Cambrian period 500-600million years ago. It contains Serpentine, which is the mineral that gives it its green colouration. Examples of Connemara marble can be found in the halls of Trinity College Dublin, on the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and in Kensington Palace. One of the producers, Joyce’s Marble Quarries, say they are launching a new slab product of the marble at the Marmomacc stone exhibition in Verona this year.

Ireland also has a red marble from the Waulsortian formation that has been used for the interiors of churches and courthouses in Cork mainly, although it appears all over Ireland. The Waulsortian limestones and dolomites are host to many of Ireland’s zinc-lead mines, for example at Lisheen and Galmoy and the former mines at Silvermines and Tynagh. The largest zinc-lead mine in Europe occurs at Navan, in Co Meath, in rocks that are the time equivalent of the Waulsortian.

From Co Donegal in the north-west comes Mountcharles sandstone, of Carboniferous age, extracted from probably the only underground stone quarry in Ireland. There is also Donegal quartzite. Both stones are available from quarries operated by McMonagle Stone, who have been involved lately in the restoration of Lough (Lake) Eske Castle.

The castle traces its roots back to the late 1400s and the famous O’Donnell family that founded the historic town of Donegal.

McMonagle Stone were involved from the start of the Lough Eske Castle restoration, working with the design team, architects and project managers. They had full responsibility for cleaning, re-pointing, indenting and replicating existing stonework on the Castle as well as supplying the sandstone for the project from their Mountcharles quarry – which was the source of the stone for the castle when it was originally built.

The Donegal quartzite is particularly popular, both in Ireland and in export markets, as paving because of its strength, durability and slip resistance, as well as its wide variation of colours, ranging from golden browns to blue grey tones.

There are examples of many of Ireland’s building stones in Dublin, where architects have brought them to enhance their designs. There is quite a lot of granite, but the most commonly seen building stone of Dublin is what is known as the Calp limestone.

Where the term ‘Calp’ comes from cannot be exactly pinpointed. In 1897 Professor O’Reilly of the College of Science in Dublin traced it back to Kirwan’s Elements of Mineralogy of 1794, in which it is described as a quarry stone of Dublin, bluish black or dark greyish blue in colour and intersected with veins of white calcerous spar.

In 1802 Knox wrote a paper on the Calp Limestone of the Dublin Region, published by the Royal Irish Academy, in which he described the distribution of the Lower Carboniferous argillaceous Calp limestone and gave an analysis of it.

Whatever the origins of the word, the stone is found in large masses in the upper part of the Lower Carboniferous. It is a fine grained dark limestone.

Lucan seems to have had a number of quarries from which Calp was extracted and the stone is now known as the Lucan Formation. CRH Roadstone operate a large quarry producing it near Belgard, about 25 miles west of Dublin. Although blocks are sold, most of the stone from it these days is crushed for aggregate.

Another limestone can be seen in the ceremonial entrance of the Irish Parliamentary Building in Dublin, the Houses of the Oireachtas at Leinster House, which was repaired about a decade ago with Leacarrow limestone from Rosscommon and Leitrim that has still not blended in with the original masonry.

That original masonry is Ardbraccan limestone from Co Meath. It is a light coloured stone that, from a distance, might perhaps be mistaken for Portland limestone from Dorset.

A Carboniferous limestone from Meath is in production today from Ross Quarry near Lough (Lake) Sheelin, operated by James Gogarty Stone.

James Gogarty Stone are a long established family stone processing business based in Donore, 25 miles north of Dublin. They bought the quarry in 2005. It has been open many years and its stone can be seen in landmark buildings in the region and beyond.

James Gogarty Stone say this side of the business has held up well in the recession, while their granite worktop business has suffered. The limestone is a light grey colour with an earthy brown when polished. It has been used for window cills, quoins and door surrounds and the company have a Steinex guillotine in the quarry for splitting the stone for walling.

For dressed stone, the blocks are sawn into slabs at the quarry and brought to the factory in Donore for working.

The back of the Houses of the Oireachtas is made from the less expensive Calp that would have been more readily available, and the servants quarters are made of two of Ireland’s granites, from Dublin and Wicklow, although they are both part of the same geological formation that straddles several counties in the south-east of Ireland.

The Bank of Ireland, a large, austere building on College Green that started life in 1729 as the home of the Irish Parliament, and the General Post Office in O’Connell Street, Dublin’s main boulevard, also incorporate these granites. On the south side of Dublin is the harbour of Dun Laoghaire, with its ferry terminal for boats to and from Holyhead in Wales and Liverpool. The harbour walls are made of hefty blocks of granite from Dalkey Quarry, which is now used as a training ground for rock climbers.

There is also a granite from Dublin known as Barnaculia granite, with large Mica crystals in it making it distinctive.

Galway and Donegal granites are also used as local building stones in the areas around the quarries, although block sizes are limited.

Often considered the best of the granites from Ireland is Ballyknockan from Co Wicklow. It is seldom used these days. Like most of the granites of the British Isles it has been replaced by imports from China that can be a quarter of the price.

In Cork there is Old Red sandstone, which is used locally although alternatives imported from the UK are more commonly used.

Ireland also has a few slate quarries that have supplied roofing in Ireland. Probably the best known in England is Valencia slate, because it was the source of slate for the roofs of the UK Parliament in London. Valencia is an island off the Iveragh Peninsula in the south-west of Co Kerry. It is one of Europe’s most westerly inhabited locations.

When it's a question of stone, Carrig have the answer

Building fabric consultants Carrig, who have offices in both Dublin and London, were involved in the selection of the light coloured limestone for the Department of Finance building in Dublin (pictured right).

The stone for the building, which was the first new building for a government department in many years when it was commissioned in 2007, is from Top Quarries in Ballinasloe, County Galway. It was supplied, worked and traditionally hand set with lime mortar on the reinforced concrete frame by Stone Developments. The main building contractors were John Paul Ltd and the design was by the award-winning Grafton Architects.

Carrig are currently involved with the largest stone procurement project in Ireland at the University of Limerick and are carrying out a fascinating study on the consolidation of historic sandstone at Boyle Abbey and Ireland’s most significant ecclesiastical relic, the City of Clonmacnoise, in the centre of Ireland, which has been nominated as a World Heritage Site. Both Boyle Abbey and the City of Clonmacnoise date from the 12th century.

Carrig, which is Irish for ‘stone’, specialise in the specification and selection of stone and for the Department of Finance building were the supervision and quality control managers of the stone package.