LIAM CARROLL was one of a kind as a property developer. The trappings of wealth: flash cars, helicopters, shares in private jets and meals in Michelin-starred restaurants were not for him.
He just got on with it, in that dogged way of his, staying well beneath the social radar.
A modest man with a mechanical engineering degree, Carroll relied on a team of architectural technicians to do his design work for Zoe Developments – on the basis that architects were “only interested in designing penthouses for fellows with Mercs”.
Once the principal engine of urban renewal in Dublin, churning out hundreds of shoe-box apartments all over the inner city, Carroll went on to become Ireland’s most unlikely corporate raider, bagging control of Dunloe Ewart plc and substantial shareholdings in Greencore and Irish Continental Group.
Faced with the task of redeveloping a coal yard on Charlotte Quay in the late 1990s, he commissioned O’Mahony Pike Architects to design what became the Millennium Tower – a 16-storey block of apartments that wouldn’t have got through the planning process without their professional expertise.
It was while Charlotte Quay was under construction that James Masterson, a 24-year-old labourer, fell to his death from the scaffolding. This led to Carroll being described by Mr Justice Peter Kelly in the High Court as “a disgrace to the construction industry”. After that, safety standards improved dramatically.
Financially, the first crack in Carroll’s armour appeared in July 2008 when he lost an estimated €20 million on the sale of shares in Aer Lingus. Three months later, Danninger Ltd, his principal vehicle, paid an outstanding debt of €140,000 to a photographer only after being faced with a petition to the High Court.
It was clear then that things were going wrong. Quite how badly became glaringly obvious last January when Carroll had to close down two newly built hotels in Tallaght, Co Dublin – the 48-bedroom Glashaus and the 186-bedroom Tallaght Cross – within a year of their gala openings; 72 people lost their jobs.
The hotels’ websites forwarded inquiries to another of his projects, the Alliance at the Gasworks, near Ringsend, which offers short-term apartment rentals in a converted Victorian gasholder; its 210 flats, first launched in mid-2006 at prices ranging from €675,000 to just over €1 million, had failed to sell.
A few months ago, daft.ie – the rental housing website – began offering rooms to let at the Glashaus and Tallaght Cross as “self-catering apartments”, for about €500 per month, with the addition of electric kettles, microwave ovens and guaranteed off-street car parking at basement level from 6pm to 10am.
Carroll’s titanic struggle in 2002 to wrest Dunloe Ewart from wily solicitor-developer Noel Smyth came back to haunt him in 2007 when the High Court agreed to include him as a defendant in a complex case involving The Square shopping centre in Tallaght at the instigation of Redfern Ltd, one of Smyth’s vehicles.
Redfern, which had paid €320 million for Quinlan Private’s stake in the shopping centre in July 2006, claimed that it had lost up to €70 million worth of tax incentives because of delays in plans to redevelop and extend The Square due to a legal dispute with the owners of Lowe Taverns over title to the car park.
Eventually, everything unravelled.
Last November, Carroll halted construction of the massive Parkway Valley shopping centre in Limerick after failing to secure anchor tenants. Although he was reported to have hopes of rescuing this €150 million scheme, the tower cranes on the site remain idle to this day.
