Brexit ‘will present a tsunami of building opportunities’
CEO of the biggest private construction company in the UK, Ray O’Rourke is looking forward to the challenges and opportunities that the UK leaving Europe will bring, writes
Ray O’Rourke landed in London on the Thursday before England won the World Cup. It was a long, long way from his birthplace in Co Mayo. That was June 1966. The country he arrived in was on the cusp of something great. The national team went on and defeated West Germany in a final that served as midwife for the birth of legends. The victory also recaptured some fading glory.
O’Rourke was a lad of 19. “Of course it was a culture shock,” he says of his arrival. “I didn’t come straight from the west. I had been in Dublin for three years by then, but it was a huge culture shock coming to a new country like that. But you just do it and you get the hang of it,” he says.
Fifty three years down the line and the same man is still looking forward to new challenges but from the vantage of the main shareholder in the biggest privately owned construction company in the UK, Laing O’Rourke. He is frequently mentioned in the various rich lists that are compiled, with his worth estimated in the hundreds of millions. Such matters are of no interest to him.
What does grab his attention at the moment is the potential for Brexit to do damage to both Britain and Ireland. Some see Brexit as a reach by elements, particularly within the Conservative party, to recapture fading glory. Ray O’Rourke’s interest in Brexit is to ensure that it doesn’t do lasting damage to either the country he’s made his home or his native country.
The first outcome in avoiding the worst of the damage, as he sees it, is a decisive result in next week’s general election.
“The uncertainty didn’t affect our business that much until the end of October when Brexit didn’t happen as Boris Johnson said that it would,” he says.
Since then, our industry has been paralysed and it will be that way until we get an outcome from the election. Hopefully, one party or the other will have a majority and we can move on. If we get a result I think we will get a huge shift [in economic activity] because this country is going to have to refloat its economy.
O’Rourke says he is apolitical. He doesn’t mind who wins a majority as long as somebody does and is able to move beyond the paralysis that has gripped the political system. Having said that, he doesn’t sound like a fan of the radical blueprint that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has put forward: “I am absolutely apolitical. I would support good leadership, that’s the main thing. The massive difference today is that leadership is not as strong as you need in order to deal with the issue that we have, irrespective of which party it is. My concern in what Jeremy Corbyn and his team are advocating is that it’s like the stuff that we saw in the late 1970s and the 1980s. I would think that it is unlikely that his leadership will get Labour across the line even with enough to form a minority government.”
He subscribes to a general consensus in business and beyond that Brexit is informed largely by emotion.
“We need to take the emotional tension out of this and consider the great relations between the UK and [the rest of] Europe and in Ireland, north and south we need to support a strong relationship with the UK post-Brexit.
There are deep and meaningful relations there and there is the opportunity to do a good trade deal. I don’t think there will be great difficulty in negotiating a deal between the UK and Europe, not the kind of difficulties you would get [in a deal] between the EU and Canada.” This is a reference to the trade deal negotiated between the EU and Canada which took seven years to complete.
All very well, but what if at the end of the trade negotiations there is no meaningful deal between the EU and the UK?
Notwithstanding his appalling record in keeping promises, Conservative leader Boris Johnson has said that the trade negotiations will end on time in December 2020. Even if he has a majority in parliament he will continue to be under pressure from the right wing rump of his party to get out by then, deal or no deal.
Arguably this wing of the party would prefer no deal.
“I don’t think that a hard Brexit is a realistic expectation,” O’Rourke says.
“I don’t think that the hard Brexiteers will get a say in this and will just have to come to terms with the idea that we need this relationship on a number of fronts. If we don’t have a relationship with Europe he [Johnson] could run the risk of civil unrest. If there is not a healthy relationship with the EU it would inflame the people who want to remain.
“There is also a critical point here about geopolitical issues. If you look at what is going on in the USA, Hong Kong, parts of Europe, this populist approach is dangerous. We do need a balanced approach.”
Ray O’Rourke is usually a man of few words in the public arena. That he has decided to speak out on this issue indicates the seriousness at which he takes the current political environment.
He started work in London literally below ground level. He says: “My first job was on the Victoria line. My father’s cousin was the pit boss and a few of us got a start there. We didn’t know what we were doing but when we got down to where the tunnel was being hand dug I got to push the buggy up to where the guys were doing the digging.” Then, as now, there was in certain quarters a degree of hostility towards people arriving in the country to work.
The mood was different for the immigrant Irish and for black people then. We don’t get hung on up that though. The Irish in the UK have done very well and made great progress.
He settled into this new life, and before long found himself working for John Murphy, a legendary figure in the London Irish community, who, not unlike O’Rourke in time, landed in Britain with nothing and built an empire.
“I worked for Murphy for eight years and decided for whatever reason to have a go at subcontracting myself. My first job was for £2,500 doing concrete work for a soil mechanics business.”
For any self-starter, the pull of being one’s own boss is usually irresistible, but O’Rourke has his own views on who exactly the boss is: “I’ve never seen what we do as being your own boss. That’s a bit of a misnomer. I can assure you when you have your own business, the business is the boss and if you don’t front up it won’t work out.”
Through the 1980s and 1990s he steadily built his business and expanded across all the whole range of civil engineering works. His company landed contracts involved in much of Britain’s major infrastructural works, particularly the cross channel tunnel project in which O’Rourke worked on the Eurostar terminal in Waterloo.
Then in 2002 a major leap forward was made with the purchase of one of the best known names in the business, Laing Construction which had fallen on hard times. An auction of sorts developed around the sale of Laing, but the downside risks involved saw most of the bidders fall away. O’Rourke bought the business for £1. In the construction business it was viewed as audacious. This Irish former sub-contractor taking over one of the most prestigious names in Britain.
“It was a very big intersection point for us and risk came with it but people try to make it into some kind of a drama. A huge opportunity came for us, we got a great brand but we also got some liabilities to deal with,” he says.
From there, Laing O’Rourke has gone from strength to strength operating across the globe from the Middle East to the Far East and Australia. Its chief executive retains hunger for more success.
As far as Brexit is concerned, he is not at one with the forecasters who predict an economic downturn after the UK leaves Europe.
“Coming out of Europe for the UK is an emotional thing,” he says.
“It’s in the mind’s eye. The UK wants to take control of its own justice system, it’s sovereignty and do all that. But over the short to medium terms we won’t see a huge difference. Certainly from our industry I don’t see a slowdown.
“There is so much pent up and so much work required I think there will be tsunami of opportunities. We have to deal with residential, schools, transport, energy. I always believe in staying on the sunny side of the street and I think it will present a lot of opportunities.”
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