Would you buy a used car from this man? Would you what? You'd buy a fleet of new cars if you listened for an hour or two to Mr Tim Mahony, the chairman of Toyota Ireland.
He is a car salesman, he tells you up front, and "by reasonable standards, I am a successful car salesman, particularly in the Irish context. I like the motor business very much."
He also engages you with his stories. Ask him how many people work for him (it's around 100) and he will tell you of the time Skoda brought a British motoring journalist to one of its plants in the then Czechoslovakia and she asked how many people worked there. The answer from the disgruntled manager was "about half of them".
Tim Mahony has been a salesman - and by all accounts a tough one - for 40 years, 30 of them with Toyota in Ireland, first as head of the assembly business and later as importer of the range of cars that took the top three and five out of the top 10 places in the JD Power satisfaction rating in the recent international survey of cars. These are not happy times in the car industry, with economies slowing down and the threat of another global war. After an all-time high in 2000, there has been contraction month-on-month in the Irish market since February.
"The boom year last year was not a good thing for the industry. Motor people are optimists by nature and they didn't realise that last year was gone and there was a new reality in their lives.
"The first three months of the year are the most important for the motor industry," he explains. "It sets the ball rolling. Like the Tipperary hurling team, we should have the hay saved and Cork 'bet'.
"Anybody who didn't see an end to the ghastly Celtic Tiger would be out of his brains, no matter what he was selling. I would like to get the fellow who invented the Celtic Tiger and wring his neck. He set more people wrong in their business decisions."
He could see it, he says. "It was easy to deal, they didn't haggle over price the way they used to and they wanted a new car. The same in housing: people just spent money as if they had it. Nobody could have foreseen what happened in New York.
"A car to a certain extent is an optional purchase and a guy would kind of say, 'we won't buy now and wait and see how matters pan out'. And companies might not replace fleet. Gradually, they will come back to buy again but never to the dizzy heights we had last year."
And what if/when there is a war? Mr Mahony's father lost his business in 1944/45, probably because of the war. Cars might have to come off the roads, he says.
"Where a lot of this trouble is going to centre is in the Middle East and the people not sleeping particularly well at the moment are the Saudis, because they control a lot of the world's oil. It's a wonderful thing for them but puts them number one in the firing line. If they start hanging the signs 'last car' at the petrol stations . . ." He trails off, but then restarts: "That's what brought us into Toyota."
Born in Dublin in 1931, Mr Mahony - who holds an honorary doctorate from Dublin City University - started working life as a civil servant in the Local Appointments Commission, but always hankered for a life in commerce.
His next job was with Exide Batteries, then Shannon Development, where at the tender age of 23 he became manager of the new mail order service. He was poached by ┌darβs na Gaeltachta as sales manager, an unhappy year, after which he became general sales manager of Wavin in Balbriggan for four years. "One day I was fired - a personality clash," he says frankly.
There he was, married with a couple of young children, in the Ireland of 1964, where jobs were not as plentiful as today. His brother, Denis, had a retail car business and was into leasing. In between jobs, he started working for Denis; they took up the Toyota dealership and, around 1970, bought Toyota Ireland from Stephen O'Flaherty.
"In leasing you have to see the car as a two-to-three-year-old banger with 40,000 to 60,000 miles on the clock. During the oil crisis, the only car at the time you could comfortably quote for was a Mercedes or a Mini.
"We reckoned Toyota was the car of the future because it was economical and trouble-free."
At the time, motor manufacturers assembled cars here and could import only a limited number of "motors on wheels". The Government insisted Toyota had to reach a target of registering 5 per cent of the cars on the market for three months in a row in order to be allowed to close assembly here, and they had to substitute the jobs that would be lost.
With Munekata of Japan, they did a technology transfer to manufacture what he calls the "cabinetry" for televisions, videos and radios for major Japanese manufacturers, who wanted greater exposure in the EU market. This was Plastronix, in Finglas in Dublin, which, at its peak, employed more than 350 - more than equal substitution for the jobs lost in assembly.
In the early 1990s, Toyota had sold out its interest in Plastronix to Munekata, and Mr Mahony read that Jack Nicklaus would like to build a golf course.
"We decided the future of the economy was in up-market tourism - it would have to be up-market because our cost structure and taxation meant Ireland could not be a low-price market."
They started the quest for a place for Nicklaus to build his golf course, purchasing Mount Juliet in Co Kilkenny.
"It has been hugely successful and very satisfying and we're kind of ready to move again with further developments there," Mr Mahony says.
The American Express golf tournament will be held there next year, with 50 to 60 of the world's top golfers playing. A new health centre and conference centre have been added and all the greens are being resurfaced.
"Although times are bad in the tourist end of the business, we seem to be shimmying by," he reports. "We were fortunately at a stage where we can draw breath and decide what we can go forward with. The events in New York mean we have to think again."
They also acquired the golf course on Fota Island in Cork. "Most people think it's because of my Cork associations (he spent two years at the North Monastery school) but it's not.
"We must have been idle in our mind or something and somebody presented us with the documentation on Fota. We seemed to buy it just like that."
Fota cost a lot of money subsequently, with 56 miles of drainage to be laid. Canadian Jeff Howes was brought in to redesign the course - but he also stole the heart and hand of Mr Mahony's daughter Jennifer. He and his wife Maeve have three other daughters: Joan, who is married to Donal Ward, Toyota's treasury manager; Sarah, married to Steve Tormey, Toyota's marketing director; and Mary, who is unmarried.
The Murphy's Irish Open there last August was a vindication of the decision to buy. "We succeeded beyond our wildest dreams," Mr Mahony says, adding that 95,000 people attended the Open, which will be back in Fota in 2002.
Tim Mahony cannot play golf - at the moment. He did, but the effects of an old disc injury from his football days have returned. He played minor and senior football for Dublin and minor for Cork.
He says he "found" Dingle in 1970 and built a house there - "only a bothβn". He likes it particularly because of his grβ for the language.
"I was a very good Irish speaker when I left school - I was reckoned to be a native speaker," he says. Every year he sponsors Golf as Gaeilge in the local golf club for locals as well as "palefaces" - people who go back to the Gaeltacht for holidays.
"I used to go down every summer for the benefit of speaking Irish on a day-to-day basis. It's a beautiful part of the world but suffering from that bloody Green Tiger . . ."
Tim Mahony says he studies selling as art. "It's the art of communication, and the job of salesman is to communicate. I was taught when learning salesmanship you have two ears and one mouth and use them in that proportion."
