I bumped into well-known concreting contractor Mick Nolan at Dublin Airport the other day. The Kildare man was returning from doing a large pour at Stratford-upon-Avon for Irish company Munster Joinery.

“We were paying £90/cube for concrete over there and it had to be ordered a week in advance,” he said.

This works out as €120/cubic meter for 40N material. Here, similar large quantities could be bought for half that price.

“We had pre-ordered 300 cubic meters (that’s 42 lorry loads) per day for this job, but we found we needed about 330. We had a big job getting the extra bit. It’s booming over there.”

Stone for under the concrete was costing £15/t, he said. That’s nearly €19/t and again it’s about twice the price of here. Altogether, Mick’s team laid 7,000 square metres of concrete to make an outdoor yard area for the Irish window company. Mick’s firm, Irish Concrete Floors, moved over its own specialist equipment for the job. Mick does a lot of the larger concrete pours for farmers, co-ops and grain merchants around Ireland.