BACKGROUND:THE APPOINTMENT of a receiver to Michael McNamara Co, the linchpin of Bernard McNamara's property empire, has once again put one of Ireland's best-known property developers into the limelight.
Originally from Co Clare, Bernard McNamara took over the construction company founded by his father Michael in the 1940s, while in his mid-20s.
One of the company’s big breaks was the construction of RTÉ’s sports and social club on its Donnybrook campus. Other state contracts followed. It soon became one of the biggest construction companies in the state.
As Ireland’s economic boom began to gather pace, Bernard McNamara, a one-time Fianna Fáil councillor, began to expand his focus away from construction, diversifying into a wide range of projects.
The breadth of his development portfolio was one of the key characteristics of McNamara’s business. Unlike other developers who may have focused on housing and retail developments in suburban Dublin and its environs, McNamara’s output ranged from hospitals and hotels to public private partnerships.
Small construction projects were gradually replaced by bigger and more ambitious development projects, including some of the country’s most exclusive hotels such as the Shelbourne and Radisson in Galway, and the disastrous investment in the Glass Bottle Site in Ringsend.
As the number of projects expanded, an array of separate corporate entities to run and finance them was set up – today Bernard McNamara is director of well over 100 companies. However, Michael McNamara Co remained at the heart of the Bernard McNamara empire, with the result that there was increasingly a blurring of boundaries between the core construction company and the related development companies.
For example, while Bernard McNamara was one of the individual investors in the Shelbourne hotel, his company Michael McNamara also completed the construction work. A similar dual interest occurred with the Radisson in Galway.
The underside of this exponential expansion was of course enormous debts, many of which were underwritten by personal guarantees from McNamara, as well as widespread collateral from related companies.
It is the interconnectedness of these loans that is one of Nama’s key challenges in assessing the viability and value of his remaining business interests.
While Bernard McNamara famously said he was “broke” in an interview on RTÉ radio in January, the settlement of the case with a group of investors who had sued McNamara over the failed €400 million Glass Bottle deal meant that he did not have to reveal details of his wealth in public.
However, according to one source close to the investors in the Glass Bottle site, he had extensive unencumbered assets at around the time of the site purchase but in the two years after that he was involved in purchases totalling an estimated €1.4 billion, by the end of which most of his assets were mortgaged.
