Tom McCabe likes to describe himself as a "maverick entrepreneur with a cavalier attitude". The 45-year-old telecommunications entrepreneur and founder of SwiftCall has gone from rags to riches three times in the last 20 years. Now Mr McCabe is back in the cash and was recently in Silicon Valley to raise venture capital for a new business venture.

It's a typical story. A young boy is ridiculed in school for being stupid because he is left handed and dyslexic. He grows up, emigrates to England, gets drunk, has continual skirmishes with the law, sobers up and becomes very rich. Well perhaps not so typical, but it's Tom McCabe's story. The actor, salesman, film producer, entrepreneur, and drug and alcohol counsellor, has proved that he may be many things, but stupid he is not.

Mr McCabe recently previewed his new film, The Titchborne Claimant, to family and friends in the Sausalito Sailing Club during a six-week working holiday in California. The £3 million sterling (€4.63 million) film, starring Stephen Fry and Sir John Gielgud was well worth every penny of Mr McCabe's money.

The story plot could have been something out of his own life. Mr McCabe, like the claimant at the centre of the film, returned home in the mid-1990s to claim his place in Irish society. He set up SwiftCall, the discounted international telephone service in a tiny office in Dublin's Temple Bar and six years later, he says, it was turning over £27 million per year.

However, recently Mr McCabe sold SwiftCall for just £400,000, a seemingly small sum until you take into account that nearly £20 million in debt went with the company. SwiftCall had bought a new telecom switch (a large computer that routes calls) in the US. The switch never worked because of incompatibilities between the Irish and US telephone systems. "It was a very expensive lesson," says Mr McCabe. "But that is the risk you take with a company like SwiftCall. You've got to take risks and sometimes they pay off and sometimes they don't."

However, it was a lesson that his bank was not willing to pay for. So it called in the debit and Mr McCabe was forced to sell to the Japanese telecommunications company KDD.

Still, Mr McCabe is not one to fret. He now says he is working as a consultant for VIP Telecom, a company that plans to do for the Irish mobile telecommunications market place what SwiftCall did for international calling cards. Mr McCabe also has a wider Internet vision of building VIP into a global telecommunications and Internet provider, primarily for third-world countries.

"I believe that VIP will become a billion-dollar company," he says optimistically. "We intend to float on the Nasdaq in the next two years."

Although a non-competitive clause in the sales contract with KDD bars Mr McCabe from reentering the telecommunications business, he is free to build an Internet business. He has already secured more than $20 million (€19.2 million) from Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and Texan Company Simplified, but here's the rub. Most of the investment is in software and equipment and to release the investment he must first get a further $15 million venture capital.

Mr McCabe started his professional life as an actor in the early 1970s and enjoyed moderate success in roles as either the crook or the policeman in episodes of the Sweeney and Minder. After spending a few years on the road as a professional actor in the 1970s he longed for a steady job. He and a companion Neill (his girlfriend at the time) went to apply for a job in Harrods. They were not hired but on their way out of the shop Neill she asked him. "Why can't we afford these lovely things?" Mr McCabe replied: "Because we're stupid."

It was an Irish attitude typical of the time. "But I knew that I had said something wrong." Mr McCabe borrowed £7 from his flat mate, Mr Noel Faulkner (owner of VIP Telecom). He printed headed note paper, bought magnetic window cleaners in a street market and sold them to the major department stores in London at a 100 per cent profit.

"Within a year I had 15 people working for me and I decided to take the business to America." It flopped. The Americans didn't want magnetic window cleaners. Mr McCabe returned to London, got a 100 per cent mortgage, bought a flat and made money in property. Then deciding to join the exiled British and Irish high-flyers, he set out for the Costa-del-Sol. "But unlike most of the people there at the time I wasn't running away from anything, except myself," he says. He ran out of money again and started touring the pubs in Fuengirola with a comedy act. "I was known as `Monkey Tom' because I used to do this act in the pubs with a puppet monkey."

Finally, he returned to London and started a courier business with Mr Faulkner. "I opened an account with the Allied Dunbar, got a loan of £4,000 walked across the road to Barclays, deposited the £4,000 and borrowed £10,000 and started the business."

But success got to Mr McCabe in the end. "Within three months I had bought a Porsche, a colour telly and a flat," he says. "I had made money and there was nothing left for me to do except drink."

Fortunately, Mr McCabe joined a self-help group and has prospered in the years since. Well emotionally at least.

He has gone from boom to bust and back again a couple of times. In the early 1980s he started a telephone-answering phone business. Then he prospered with a premium telephone date-a-mate service in Britain. He went bust when the service failed due to computer problems. It was during his last bust period that he got the idea for SwiftCall.

"My wife was calling her sister in California and the bills were astronomical," he says. "I thought it would be cheaper to have a private line. Then I realised that I could buy one line, split it into eight lines and sell transatlantic calls."

At the time he was pushing the limits of the law and was brought to court by AT&T. "I like to see myself as a maverick entrepreneur with a cavalier attitude. I didn't go grovelling to people when I was broke so I am damned if I am going to do it now," he says.