It's not a good time for people unfortunate enough to have put their money into the Irish market's only publicly quoted property companies, Dunloe Ewart and Green Property.

Dunloe shares have gone down the tubes in dramatic style in the past couple of weeks after the group was forced to write off €15 million (£11.8 million) against its Northern Ireland property portfolio. But in truth, Dunloe - a corporate battlefield between Zoe's Liam Carroll and Dunloe chairman Noel Smyth - has been on the slide for months. It's hard to see where the upside is for shareholders unless Messrs Carroll and Smyth bury their differences and jointly take the company private.

The chances of that happening? The words "snowball" and "hell" would normally spring to mind but financial self-interest can overcome many obstacles.

Liam Carroll, whose Zoe Developments has probably built more apartments in Dublin than anybody else, has never spoken publicly about why he is devoting so much of his money (or rather his bankers' money) building up a 26 per cent stake in Dunloe.

But the unpalatable fact for Mr Carroll and Irish Nationwide (one of his main financiers) is that he has spent upwards of €50 million buying more than 100 million shares and those shares are now worth not much more than €20 million given the collapse in the Dunloe share price. No doubt all those apartments have made the reclusive Mr Carroll a wealthy man, but a €30 million hit is serious money even for the wealthy.

Irish Nationwide's Michael Fingleton might also be a trifle concerned. Last November, Irish Nationwide told the Irish Stock Exchange that Mr Carroll had mortgaged more than 100 million Dunloe shares to the building society "as security for certain advances".

Back them, Mr Fingleton declined to tell The Irish Times how much he had lent Mr Carroll for what on the surface seemed speculative stake-building in a public company, citing client confidentiality. But a spokesman for the society was emphatic that taking public company shares as security for commercial loans was perfectly in keeping with Central Bank requirements. But when the society took possession of those 100 million shares as security they were worth €46 million. Now they are worth just €22 million.

Ever since Liam Carroll bought out most of the institutional investors in Dunloe at a price that had the institutions purring with pleasure, there has been speculation that he intended to use his pivotal position to get control of some of Dunloe's prize assets, not least its jewel site on Sir John Rogerson's Quay in Dublin.

But all Mr Carroll seems to have done with his 26 per cent stake is to block a buy-back of 34 million shares at €0.55 a share - more than twice the current level in the market.

This whole episode would be funny if it were not for the unfortunate Dunloe shareholders left holding shares that have lost more than half their value in the past year. Mr Carroll bought most of his shares from institutions delighted to fund a buyer. Apart from Mr Carroll's 26 per cent, Noel Smyth's 22 per cent and Phil Monahan's 7 per cent, a large chunk of the remaining stock is held by unfortunate punters.

At €0.22, Dunloe is currently trading at less than half the Davy's end-2001 forecast net asset value of €0.48 and the company is in horrendous shape. But small shareholders - unless they got in years ago at a knockdown price - have no option but to sit tight and hope that the two big shareholders can come to some accommodation that will give them something.