Paddy’s day is upon us and it might be an opportune time to reflect on the looming demise of that most Irish of species – the small builder. The new building regulations announced by Phil Hogan are expected to deliver an end to the last remaining members of that species. Every small builder in Tipperary has been onto me over the last few weeks.

Under these new regulations, the days of direct labour are gone and any new building or extension project over 435ft2 has to have a designer assigned to it and a certified contractor selected to carry out the work. In this scenario, the small man and the homeowner taking on direct labour, apparently are all fecked. The Horse Mac is a big man, but a small builder in Teerawadra and was at my door at cockcrow the other day after he heard about the new regulations.

The Horse is a born complainer, who thinks everyone on the planet is better off than he is. He also believes he is the victim of a worldwide conspiracy to ensure he’s the last one to hear any bit of news. They say that when he discovered his wife was on the pill for 20 years, he nearly went off his head, not because he feared offending the faith of his fathers, but because “no one ever tells me anything around here.”

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Last Monday week, he arrived at my door, in fact he nearly drove his pick-up truck into the porch, after ’twas explained to him that Big Phil’s regulations might bring an end to his reign as the major player in the construction industry of Teerawadra.

“Is it the poorhouse ye want to send me to?” He shouted before I even knew what he was shouting about.

“The big developers got away, but the small man who just kept his head down is goin’ to be hung out to dry so that the same big boys can get all the work. If I had time I’d start a feckin’ revolution,” he roared.

The Mother, who had come to the door at the sound of the commotion, added her tuppenceworth to the discussion. She has no time for The Horse Mac thanks to something he did to my father years ago, but that’s another story.

“Well Horse,” says she. “Thanks to Big Phil’s regulations you’ll have plenty of time on your hands to start any revolution you like.”

Mick turned on her: “It mightn’t matter to you Mrs Hickey, but the person to suffer most because of this is the woman who wants to build an extension without any fuss. Anything bigger than a hen house and you’ll have to have an architect and a certified contractor. ’Tis all jobs for the boys if you ask me.”

“Begod Horse,” says the Mother. “You’re a late convert to the cause of women in the home. But I suppose fellas like you would know everything about hen houses, you built a lot of them in your time and convinced people they were extensions.”

You’d have to admit there’s a certain amount of truth in what the Mother says, many an edifice was stuck on to the gable end or the back end of houses in the name of improvement, but it turned out to be damper and draughtier than the original construction. Fellas got away with murder, but, as The Horse Mac said, the big “reputable” builders left more than their fair share of shoddy work behind them when the money ran out and the cement mixers stopped turning.

It’s hard to blame The Horse and his likes for being worried, for years they practised their trade picking up new building technologies on the hoof and learning new ways of working as they went. They spent their lives ferreting around at the blind side of the taxman and the planning authority, but they knew their clients and did enough to get by.

Nevertheless, there was a fair share of them who can only be described as ‘melted hoors’ who never lost an opportunity to make a few quick pound. It’s true for the Mother, women were especially vulnerable to these fellas.

Show them a spot of dampness and they’d shove the cap back on their poll declaring they saw nothing as bad as it in years.

As they scratched their heads and waved their measuring tape around like a priest sprinkling holy water, they told the woman that while nothing short of a bulldozer or a stick of dynamite would solve her problem they’d see what they could do.

Before the husband even knew the builder was called, half the house was pulled down and herself had been talked into breaking a door through a window and adding on a sunroom.

Is Big Phil about to put an end to all that?