John de Courcy: It was appropriate that John de Courcy should have died in the month in which the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday was celebrated. He was an acknowledged expert on and lover of the topography of Dublin and in 1998 gave a paper to the Irish Joyce Society on The Liffey and Joyce.
A man of wide interests, he combined a distinguished career as a civil engineer with a fascination for the Liffey, on the history of which over the last 1,000 years he wrote a substantial book (The Liffey in Dublin, 1996, Gill and Macmillan), and a love of mountaineering.
He was a founder member in the 1950s, with his wife's brother-in-law, Joss Lynam, of the Irish Mountaineering Club.
John de Courcy, also known as Sean, was born in Sligo on July 2nd, 1918, of a Limerick-born father, also John de Courcy, and an English mother, Isabel Wray, a nurse.
He was descended on his mother's side from a judicial official of the court of Queen Elizabeth I, who had ordered the beheading of the Jesuit martyr, Edmund Campion. De Courcy was quite proud of this connection, and himself made up for it by developing a devout Catholic faith, becoming in time, as an adult, a brancardier at Lourdes at more than 20 Irish pilgrimages.
At school with the Jesuits at Mungret College in Co Limerick, he excelled at mathematics and at the age of 16 was accepted as a student in the Department of Engineering at University College Dublin. He graduated at the age of 19 with first-class honours.
During the second World War, he worked with Limerick County Council. After the war he made the fateful decision to go and work in England with the British Reinforced Concrete engineering company (BRC).
Thereafter, reinforced concrete was to be the focus of his professional career. Appointed to head the company's Irish operations in 1950, he undertook deeper study of the subject and in 1959 was awarded the degree of Master of Engineering from UCD for a thesis on permanent joints in structures containing reinforced concrete. While at BRC he worked in many different parts of the world, including Nigeria, Mauritius, Gibraltar and the Channel Islands.
Appointed a lecturer in civil engineering at UCD in 1964, he began a distinguished 24-year association with his alma mater, being appointed associate professor in 1971 and professor emeritus on his retirement in 1988. He held many posts with the Institution of Engineers of Ireland (IEI) in this period, being made a fellow in 1969 and becoming in time a member of the IEI's council, the chairman of its civil division and an honorary fellow in 1988.
During his UCD days, he also lectured students in the School of Architecture there on civil engineering aspects of that profession: in 1988 he was elected an honorary member of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (MRIAI), a rarity for an engineer.
His abiding interest in concrete brought de Courcy into much contact with the wider, international world of engineering. He became an occasional lecturer with several British universities, including Cambridge, Sheffield and London. A member of the Council of the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) from 1977, he became its president for the year 1980-81.
Much earlier, in 1960 he had founded with L.F. Stephens, T. Duggan and D. Herlihy the Irish Pre-Stressed Concrete Association, which became the Irish Concrete Society in 1970. He became an honorary fellow of the (British) Institute of Concrete Technology in 1987.
Clearly a man with an aptitude for committee work, he served on many for a range of different organisations, including An Foras Forbatha, where he was for a time chairman of the Construction Division Advisory Committee, AnCO (forerunner of FÁS), where he was chairman of the Construction Industry Training Committee, and the National Standards Authority of Ireland, where he was chairman from 1981 to 1986.
After retirement, he had more time for his wider interests and served as chairman of the National Library of Ireland Society, and as a member of the consultative committee for the Millennium Bridge over the Liffey.
John de Courcy married in 1953 Sheila Gorevan, an orthoptist, and the couple had six children. His wife, and five of his children, Mary, Catherine, Sheila, Brigie and Anna, survive him. A son, Michael, was killed in a sporting accident in 1986.
John de Courcy: born July 2nd, 1918; died June 23rd, 2004