Not many tourists visiting Dublin prove as fortunate as the lucky Londoner staying in Fionn MacCumhaill's Castle Hotel, off Parnell Square, last weekend.

Spotted by the ebullient Mr MacCumhaill, he was taken to Croke Park for the All-Ireland Women's Senior Football Final between Galway and Dublin where he was greeted by no less than the Taoiseach himself. Just the sort of thing to make a holiday memorable and evidence of the personal touch that guarantees the repeat business on which Mr MacCumhaill has built a stable of small, historic hotels throughout the capital.

A former civil servant, Mr MacCumhaill started out with £7 in the late 1960s, building up his capital by running a part-time electrical business before going on to buy a bed and breakfast in the city centre.

He now owns seven properties, many of them refurbished Georgian buildings, individually furnished and offering a real flavour of Dublin. With more than 300 beds between them, they are spread throughout the city centre, from Parnell Square on the northside to St Stephen's Green on the southside. The portfolio has been painstakingly assembled with the various properties' historic associations foremost in Mr MacCumhaill's mind.

For instance, the 46-room Castle Hotel, officially located on Denmark Street, is the oldest hotel still trading in the capital, having opened its doors in 1809, according to Mr MacCumhaill.

The adjacent Waltons is built on the site of the famous music store, which remains in business next door.

"The hotel business is one- third buildings, one-third people and one-third selling," says Mr MacCumhaill, who learnt the business in his aunt's bed and breakfast in Fairview in the 1960s.

Another MacCumhaill property is Stauntons on the Green, run with his partner James Staunton. The original lodging house of the National University, and once the home of Henry Grattan, he bought it cheap in 1991 from property group Dunloe House which, ignoring the fact that it had a wash-hand basin in every room, had repeatedly attempted and failed to turn it into an office block.

But despite his pursuit of interesting properties, Mr MacCumhaill also pays close attention to their cost. "I am aware of the truth of our industry, that the property cost determines the room cost. How can we be cheaper than others? Your staff cost is the same, your heating is the same, the only one item that can make you cheaper is the property cost."

Mr MacCumhaill - who describes his name as "the best marketing tool you could ever have" because nobody ever forgets it - also uses his charging system to his advantage.

The Castle Hotel charges a flat fee of €99 for a double room, regardless of what match, concert or other event is taking place in the city. "One of our marketing tools is that we are fair traders in the old manner. We don't go in for modern yield management techniques," he says.

Although coy about the performance of his business - as a sole trader, he says the numbers are between himself, God and the Revenue Commissioners - he claims an occupancy rate of between 70 to 80 per cent, putting his annual turnover at more than €7.5 million, based on a conservative estimate.

The value on offer on Dublin's northside, combined with his upbringing in Whitehall and his schooling in Coláiste Mhuire in Parnell Square, may have been among the factors that prompted him to resist the mass exodus of property developers to the southside when he bought his first property, the Fatima House bed and breakfast on Gardiner Street in 1981.

Dublin's artificial divide is an issue he still feels strongly about. Aside from championing the small hotel sector - which he sees as the guardian of our architectural heritage - Mr MacCumhaill has also been involved in the rejuvenation of the area around Parnell Square through the City Centre Business Association which he helped found in the early 1990s.

He was inspired to set up the development association following his purchase of Latchford's on Baggot Street when he realised that while the southside street had been twice re-paved, the broken pavement on Parnell Square remained untouched.

"I'm a Dubliner. I don't believe in this northside/southside thing which, to be honest, has been a disadvantage for this town tourism wise."

He blames "the commercial apartheid" practised by the Civil Service for the divide that has emerged in the city in recent decades, pointing to the failure to build a rail link to the airport as the most recent evidence of this.

Despite his criticism of Irish bureaucracy, Mr MacCumhaill spent his early working life in the borrowing section of the Department of Finance, before later transferring to Telecom Éireann, and retains a civil servant's caution. All of his property ventures have been undertaken with various partners, his way of spreading the risk.

"It's always been the way I worked. I've always laid off the odds with somebody and I still do it today.

"Two heads are better than one, provided you can get on with them... It's also a means to save your marriage and keep your head and it gives you breathing space to develop other things along the way."

His decision to take redundancy from his day job in Telecom in 1990 was not an easy one and, with a wife and five children to support, he admits to being "very, very nervous about it". But the realisation that his salary just about paid the telephone bills of his two hotels prompted him to abandon his security net and make the break.

Since then, he has built up his business in Dublin to a level that allows him to withstand the challenge posed by larger hotel groups such as the neighbouring Gresham and Jurys Doyle, which has been steadily rolling out its inns format across the capital.

The opening of a Jurys Inn on Parnell Street, around the corner from three of his hotels, does not faze Mr MacCumhaill. Nor is he worried by Ramada's recent announcement that it plans to spend more than €300 million opening 37 hotels here over the next three years.

"The more hotels you gather in one place, the more they prosper," he says, noting the Parnell Square area was home to as many as 22 hotels at one stage early in the last century.

"Mixing the supermarket hotels with the unique properties gives the town a great flavour. Besides, they'll never be able to do what I do."

In recent years, his desire to hedge his bets has led him to venture further afield.

In 2001, along with business partners Mr Staunton and Frank Latchford, he bought the four-star Atholl Palace Hotel, in Pitlochry in Scotland, attracted by the large British market. "But the biggest reason I bought it is that it was a lovely building and it was closing," he says.

He has plans for further expansion in the UK. Having looked at London twice and walked away both times, he is again considering properties in the British capital and is also negotiating an 80-bed property in Wales.

At home, he is hoping to open a student hostel on Dorset Street, but further expansion of his hotel business is likely to be constrained by recently-introduced regulations relating to room size.

"It's not progress to homogenise hotels, not to have a town house category or a Palladian mansion category," he says.

But whatever the venture, his properties have one common denominator. "The secret is the same: a good bathroom and a really good bed. That's what you're selling, a night's sleep, a home from home."

Throw in his belief that "my job is to make everybody feel special" and it's no wonder that one Londoner has likely returned home with fond memories of his trip to Dublin.