From Bandon to China, Fleming went global

EXPOSURE? It is a long way from the exposed West Cork coastline and the scenic Seven Heads to money-mill windfarms in the mid-west of the United States of America, but that’s just one of the journeys taken by John Fleming.

Founder and backbone of the Fleming Group, with a turnover at peak of as much a as €300 million a year, John Fleming has been the quiet man of the Irish building and development boom, since his start back in 1975 building agricultural sheds. He now has business dealings across Europe, the US, Dubai and China.

Fleming himself is teetotal, and his business has kept a similar sobriety: despite a far-flung geographic business base, there was never a Fleming Group helicopter or jet. He took a train to yesterday’s court appearance with ACC, where he was successful in having an examiner appointed in lieu of a receiver to one of his companies, Tivway.

John Fleming’s business interests have diversified from straight-forward contracting and building into areas like tourism, hotels, golf courses and GAA clubs.

It includes student accommodation and alternative energy generation, such as a bio-fuel plant in Iowa, wind farms in the offing in the US, as well as providing thousands of apartments for Britain’s housing association market, many of them from his steel-frame system-build factory in Ringaskiddy, Cork harbour.

Along the way, Fleming Construction/Fleming Group has encompassed parks and shopping centres in Ireland, tourism and hotel investments like the Inchydoney Lodge and Spa, Fota Island Resort and Limerick’s Radisson Hotel. He is taking system building to new heights, literally, with a 24-storey apartment building in Wolverhampton set to be Europe’s tallest modular building.

Headquartered in Bandon, the Fleming Group diversified out of Fleming Construction which started out in 1975 at John Fleming’s native Seven Heads, near Barryroe, and is a major employer of West Cork labour and skills.

Early projects included engineering works, bridges and piers, and the span from 1975 to 2005 included a start in steel farm sheds and barns, culminating in his patented steel frame/modular building system which at peak employed up to 300 at a factory in Ringaskiddy, Cork harbour, with more than two acres of “house factory” under its roof.

Despite literally manufacturing houses and apartments by the thousand, for now-saturated markets in Cork, Waterford, Limerick and Dublin (including Sandyford Beacon Quarter, where un-sold apartment prices were cut by an average of €2000,000 in May of this year) it was a lofty office block which now sees him in conflict with ACC for a 14-storey office building called The Sentinel, and where ACC is owed about €21 million.

Fleming Group is controlled by John Fleming, his daughter Michelle, right hand man Vincent O’Donovan and Jim Galvin on the alternative energy side. One of three brothers he was born to a fisherman father, John Fleming.

John Fleming still lives within 500 metres of where he was born and once noted “people don’t have to travel to be successful in business”.

Take note, though, that comes from man who travelled on a day trip to Australia to see a steel-frame factory he wanted to learn about.