Rob Lynch was interested in history and archaeology through school and university, never for a second thinking what the job prospects might be, let alone the business opportunities.
“I remember going to dinner with two schoolfriends who were planning on studying commerce in UCD. When their mum asked what I was going to study, and I told her, they all fell around laughing,” he said.
He may be having the last laugh, though. His passion has grown into Irish Archaeological Consultancy (IAC), the largest archaeological group in the country, which also has offices in the UK.
Having gone to school in Blackrock College, Lynch graduated from UCD with a degree in archaeology and classics in 1994, and only then wondered how to make a living.
“Firstly, I went to the Archaeological Institute’s annual conference, just to see what was going on in the sector, and did what was fairly standard practice at the time: I worked for nothing on sites as a volunteer, to get some experience under my belt and in the hope that, eventually, someone would hire me.”
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It wasn’t long before he started landing paid work, working on projects from Trim Castle to digs in Slovakia and Greece. In 1998, aged 25, he set up his own practice. Lynch’s timing was good.
The construction boom led to IAC, based in Kilcoole, Co Wicklow, getting a steady stream of work with property developers, architects, town planners and local authorities. Anybody who needed earth turned needed an archaeological survey first.
“Whenever a development is planned, part of the due diligence involves assessing the archaeological risk that is involved,” he said. “That’s done in a consultancy style report.” The site may then be subject to geophysical surveys or test trenching. “If there is an archaeological find on the site, our job is to identify the risk on behalf of the client and then come up with a pragmatic solution to deal with it, including talking to the design team to tweak the design.”
Despite working on hundreds of sites over more than 20 years, finding something ancient still excites him.
“We’ve recently been working on a site in Roscommon, which has unearthed a complex, early medieval cemetery with 800 skeletons in it, some of which are showing signs of a range of burial types and traditions” he said.
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“What gets the public’s imagination, because it’s visual, tends to be artefacts but personally what I love is imagining the lives of the people who were here before.”
In Louth the company worked on a late Bronze Age ritual site, a 50-metre circle with ditches and banks 5m high and 5m deep.
“The scale was monumental,” Lynch said. “You don’t lose that sense of wonder.”
Throughout the Celtic tiger years, much of IAC’s work was on roads. At its peak the practice employed 350 people, most of who were contractors, with a core team of 40 staff. Peak turnover was €8m. The recession struck hard, however. A survey in 2008 found there were 1,700 people in Ireland working as archaeologists. Within a few years that had fallen to just 200.
“We were able to hang on to our core team because we had a good client base,” said Lynch. Overall, “the guts of 10 years” was spent “with just enough to keep us busy.”
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Three years ago the firm began bidding for work in Northern Ireland and used it as a stepping stone into the UK. It now has offices in Belfast, Birmingham and Manchester.
Over the past 18 months, business has started to pick up again. Revenues are growing at about 20% a year, the core staff is up to 30 and contractor numbers are up, too.
“Archaeology is a compliance issue for developers and in some cases those developers will go for the lowest-priced service,” said Lynch. “We differentiate ourselves in the market by the quality of our work, and good clients see the value in getting the best possible advice for their projects, someone that will come up with not just problems, but solutions for those problems. And that’s what we do.”