Brushing up: A monument to “Demolition” Dave Conway, who helped clear the way for the Luas’s Red Line

The monument is perched on the south side of the Smithfield stop, from where the Luas snakes towards Tallaght. 

Its silvery granite surface is a little dirty with bird droppings. But when all the seats in the shelter are taken, it offers an extra one or two.

It’s not just a bench, though. It’s an artwork honouring the life of Dave Conway, who was known to his colleagues as “Demolition Dave”.

“IN CELEBRATION OF ‘DEMOLITION DAVE’ DAVE CONWAY FRIEND, PARTNER, SON AND DAD. 1963 – 2001”, reads a plaque at its feet.

The memorial pieces together objects central to Conway’s life.

Two spheres at the front of its base symbolise his motorbike and his love for it, says James Gannon, the sculptor who made it. “He was a motorbike enthusiast.”

A wrecking ball is resting inside one of the spheres, a nod to Conway’s work as a demolition man. He helped to clear a path for the Luas’s Red Line, back when it was still a work in progress. 

“He was a crane driver,” says Gannon, standing over the piece recently. 

On the surface of the monument, there are two railway tracks. One is unfinished. “That’s his life cut short,” says Gannon. 

Life on two wheels 

Hamid Foroughi rarely got to grab more than one pint with Conway after work.

Conway was a doting dad to a small boy, he says. “And he wanted to see him before he went to bed.”

He’d slip away, hopping on his motorbike to rush home, says Foroughi.

Twenty-three years ago, Foroughi worked as a design manager for the Railway Procurement Agency – what’s now called Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII). 

TII roadmaps and manages the growth of Luas lines. Foroughi now leads a planning department there. 

Conway laid the groundwork for the Red Line by clearing the passage, said Foroughi, recently, sitting in a big meeting room at TII’s offices on Parkgate Street. 

“He was a no-nonsense guy, you know, especially at work,” said Foroughi.

He’d get the job done, he says. They got on well, bonding over a shared interest in motorbikes. “He was talking about bikes a lot, and I was interested.”

Foroughi only stopped riding his two years ago, after a crash. His wife’s orders, he says, laughing.

Foroughi doesn’t have a photo of Conway but remembers him as short and strong. “He was well-built.”

Tony Williams, principal landscape architect for TII, remembers Conway as a good-natured, outdoorsy kind of guy.

“He was fantastic, you know. And he loved his motorbike,” said Williams. 

He lived just outside Dublin and used it to commute to work, he said. 

Where the trams stop 

The pieces captured in Gannon’s creation – the motorbike, the wrecking ball, and the railroad – don’t just visualise Conway’s short life but also his death. 

One day in 2001, after wrapping up work, he crashed his motorbike and died on the road – on the way back to his little boy.

Foroughi attended Conway’s funeral with lots of other TII colleagues at the time, he says. “It was very sad. He was something like three years younger than me.”

Most people at TII have heard of him, even those who joined after his death, he says, thanks to the Smithfield monument.

Williams, TII’s senior landscape architect, says he and a few other colleagues wanted to commemorate Conway near the Red Line route he cleared.

“So we asked his family, we asked close friends and they said something that looks like a motorbike would be great,” he said.

Ken McHugh, an anti-racism activist who’s a cultural planner by trade, represented a community group on the Luas project and chose Gannon’s idea for the piece. “I commissioned Jim to make it,” he said in a text message recently. 

Gannon made it in his home studio, a stone’s throw from the Luas stop in Smithfield.

The granite on its surface is from a building in Dún Laoghaire, borrowed from a construction site, he said. 

“It’s Dublin granite,” said Gannon, tapping on the monument.

Foroughi, Conway’s colleague, quickly corrects himself when he calls it a bench. But Gannon said it doesn’t matter if passersby and passengers see it as just that. 

“It serves the public. I just wish it was cleaner,” he said, smiling. 

But what matters is that every single day, the trams stop in front of something that celebrates the man who made room for them, he said.