In ways, Tom Gilmartin is the classic self-made Irish businessman in Britain. And like many Irish people who left in the hopeless 1950s and made good in Britain, he continues to believe the Republic is a narrow and corrupt place, where success is determined not by hard work and imagination but by who you know and who you pay off.

When, 30 years after leaving Ireland, Mr Gilmartin decided to put some of the money he had made over the water back into the country, he found the corruption more all-pervasive than ever. According to him, he found his dream of two massive shopping centres in Dublin blocked by an array of politicians, councillors and planners seeking payola, and not even this could guarantee his developments.

Mr Gilmartin was born 63 years ago into a farming family of six children in the townland of Lislarry on the north Sligo shore a few miles outside the village of Grange. Coincidentally, it is where the Haughey family have one of their many holiday homes. His father was a typical small farmer of the time, working for the county council and the Land Commission to supplement his income.

Tom was bright and ambitious, but there were few opportunities in 1950s Ireland. He tells the story of how, in his early 20s, he applied for a job in the Civil Service. He sat the exam and was told he had done well and should get ready to leave for Dublin.

One evening in the summer of 1956, as he made hay with his father, the news came that he had not been given the position after all. He was told it had gone to another young man whose father worked in the government department where the post was vacant. Tom Gilmartin was England-bound.

He took a trail travelled by people from Grange before and since to the Vauxhall factory in Luton, one of the capitals of the booming British car industry.

He worked there in various jobs connected with the car industry, from assembly-line work through steel erecting to mechanical handling systems and conveyor belts. He made his money in the last of these areas. He formed his own firm and in 1980, when the Vauxhall plant was being overhauled, won the contract for a new automated production-line system.

His business career had its low points - he had problems with the British Inland Revenue and twice went out of business - but he built the firm up again to a workforce of several hundred.

At the end of the 1970s he started to invest in property in Milton Keynes, north of Luton, which was experiencing spectacular growth following its designation a decade earlier as one of Britain's major new towns, with accompanying tax and other incentives.

Mr Gilmartin quickly showed his gift for spotting strategic sites, buying up the land, finding partners to develop office blocks on them, and then selling those offices on to big companies and institutions.

The 1980s saw him expanding his interests to Northern Ireland. He joined a partnership which bought out a rundown shopping centre in Bangor, Co Down, and redeveloped it. In 1987 it was destroyed in a fire caused by an electrical fault. Mr Gilmartin collected the insurance and then sold his interest to another developer.

So he had plenty of money when he started looking at Dublin sites in the late 1980s. Colleagues say he may have put as much as £6 million of his own money into assembling land in Dublin.

His eye for a strategic site had not deserted him. His vision now was big indeed. First he bought up semi-derelict parts of the area behind Bachelor's Walk in the city centre, and proposed a shopping centre of a million square feet with a bus station on top. He got strong support for the plan from Fianna Fail ministers, led by the then minister for the environment, Mr Padraig Flynn.

When this ran into problems, he turned his attention to an even more ambitious project on the city's western edge. Here he assembled a 180-acre site at Quarryvale. It was superbly situated at the junction of the yet-to-be completed M50 motorway and the main road to Galway and the west.

His plan was to build Ireland's largest shopping and leisure centre, a massive 1.5 million sq ft complex which would include a high-tech business park, a 250-bedroom hotel and a sports centre with an Olympic-size swimming pool.

His problems, say colleagues at the time, were twofold. One was that he refused to compromise on the huge size of the project; the Liffey Valley centre now on the Quarryvale site is a mere 300,000 square feet, although further phases are being planned.

Secondly he did not understand the Irish way of preparing the ground for such projects. Favourable tax designation, planning permission, rezoning, overturning the county development plan all had to be lobbied for and, it seems, paid for.

One former associate remembers: "He had cast-iron evidence of three senior members of the Fianna Fail government taking money. Half the councillors in Dublin had to be paid and so had some of the planners," remembers one former associate. "It was very disheartening for him. There were people with better connections than him and he was just being blocked."

Mr Gilmartin had borrowed heavily from AIB to finance the Quarryvale site, and when he was unable to persuade Dublin county councillors to go along with his development, he was pressured by the bank into forming a partnership with the Cork-based developer Owen O'Callaghan. Eventually, Mr O'Callaghan bought out Mr Gilmartin's interest, or rather his accumulated debt to AIB, and built the shopping centre that opened late last year.

Associates say Mr Gilmartin returned to England a deeply disillusioned man, despite having recouped his money from Mr O'Callaghan in an £8 million deal, negotiated for him by Ben Dunne's solicitor Noel Smyth, who received over £1 million for his services. Much of this appears to have gone to the Inland Revenue, which presented him with a multi-million-pound tax bill in the early 1990s, over which he is now involved in litigation.

One former close colleague says: "He was a decent man, a bit old-fashioned in the way that the Irish in England used to be. He was a clever man, if a bit `engineerish' in that he tended to see solutions in black and white terms. If someone mentioned old buildings he would say: `They're old and useless. Get rid of them.' He had a clear idea of what he wanted and was impatient with other people's objections and restrictions."

Friends and colleagues say Mr Gilmartin was not in the property business for the money but because he enjoyed it. They add that he really did see himself putting back money and jobs into Ireland so that young people would not have to emigrate as he had. But after the dynamic pro-business atmosphere of Thatcher's Britain he found Ireland in the late 1980s was a place where all the old corruption and backscratching he had come to hate still ruled.

"All they're good for is thieving and robbing and running to Brussels with the begging bowl," he would say.