Michael Lee Mallaghan
Born: September 15th, 1939
Died: June 6th, 2022
When Lee Mallaghan, who has died aged 82, and two friends, Pat O’Neill and Pat Douglas, set up Powerscreen in 1966 the business world in Northern Ireland was in some respects a “cold place” for those from a Catholic and nationalist background. As his son, Conor, told his funeral Mass last month in Maynooth, Co Kildare, his father and his colleagues had little to back them but their hard work and ingenuity.
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Fortunately, Mallaghan had both qualities in spades. He and his eight siblings grew up on a small farm, where he started work almost as soon as he could walk, picking potatoes, cutting turf and tending to cattle. The farm had no electricity until he and his brother Terry built their own generator while still in their teens. Interestingly, for one who would in time become an accomplished engineering innovator and inventor, accruing 30 patents to his name, Mallaghan was not at all academically inclined in school, and left to start an apprenticeship in a local garage.
From its establishment, Ulster Plant (which was later renamed Powerscreen) expanded very rapidly. Its unique selling proposition was its take on mining and quarrying equipment. It developed machines that brought the work process right up to the quarry face. Materials such as sand and gravel were processed and sifted in situ, eliminating the need to remove, for example, blasted rock in quarries for processing elsewhere. Today the firm is the global leader in this business and was bought by the international engineering group Terex in 1999.
In 1977, in the midst of the Troubles, Powerscreen moved its headquarters to Carton House in Co Kildare, the great Palladian mansion designed by Richard Castle in 1739 and later remodelled by Richard Morrison. It had been the seat of the FitzGeralds, dukes of Leinster, until 1949. Its previous owners, the family of Lord Brocket, who had bought it from the FitzGeralds, had run it as a farm but that enterprise was in no way able to support the maintenance of such a historic grand house, and they sold it to Powerscreen.
When Powerscreen listed on the stock market in 1986, Mallaghan, as one of the bigger shareholders, finally had the resources to do what he wanted, having both a powerful aesthetic but also, crucially, a business vision for the estate.
He bought Carton outright from Powerscreen, but the challenge was immense: the house and its unique landscape together form one of the most important parts of Ireland’s built heritage. The house contains the Gold Salon, described by the late Desmond Guinness as “probably still Ireland’s most important and intact 18th-century room,” and the unique Chinese bedroom, designed by the first duchess of Leinster, Emily.
Today, with the support of other investors whom Mallaghan brought on board in 1999, Carton is a world-class golf and sporting estate. It was sold to Irish American businessman John Mullen in 2017.
But in 1986 it was endangered. Years of decline had threatened the fabric of the building. Nearly a third of the stonework needed to be repaired, and the timber in many of the 230 windows had rotted. In 2000, Mallaghan commissioned architects Murray Ó Laoire to supervise the restoration, who ensured a sensitive approach was taken. In the words of Christopher Ridgeway, in Aspects of Irish Aristocratic Life, the “quality of the restoration both indoors and outdoors has been of a very high order.”
Ridgeway, the curator of Castle Howard in Yorkshire, commenting on the creation of two golf courses (designed, respectively, by Colin Montgomerie and Michael O’Meara) and a new hotel in the demesne, within the context of the historic landscape, wrote that “for many people, the words ‘golf course’, ‘hotel’ and ‘country house’ spark an almost irrational fear and loathing, [but] at Carton this is not so”.
To preserve the property’s vistas, created in the mid-18th century by the first duke of Leinster, Mallaghan had 150,000 beech and oak trees planted, and the Federation of European Greenkeepers awarded the Carton its “Committed to Creen” award in 2006 in recognition of its successful environmental practices.
Mallaghan’s other great sporting passion was Gaelic football, especially that of his native Tyrone. His widow, Mary, is a sister of renowned former Tyrone senior Gaelic football manager Mickey Harte, and the family never missed the county’s visits to Croke Park. Mary survives him, with their children Conor, Bronagh, Deboragh and Stephen. He is survived also by his siblings Sean, Kathleen, Sheila, Eileen and Geraldine. He was predeceased by his sister Maura, and his brothers Terry and Brian.