The Big Developers:Liam Carroll's Zoe Developments built more apartments in Dublin's inner city than all other builders combined, and his aggressive takeover tactics have helped him assemble other major landbanks, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor
Nobody knows what Liam Carroll is going to do next - apart from himself and those in his tight circle. Certainly, it would have been impossible to imagine that the man behind Zoe Developments and all the shoebox apartments it built in the early 1990s would go on to become one of Ireland's leading corporate raiders.
His latest target is Irish Continental Group (ICG), which owns Irish Ferries. In the midst of a takeover battle between two consortiums for control of the company, Carroll built up a stake of 26.25 per cent - possibly to become kingmaker (a role he also sought to play in Jurys Doyle and Greencore), or with his sharp eye on the 33 acres in Dublin Port on which ICG owns the lease.
The reclusive, cash-rich developer first entered the Greencore lists in summer 2006, when he paid €170 million for the 22.2 per cent stake held for years by billionaire financier Dermot Desmond. He has since bought more shares to bring his stake to 29.5 per cent - just below the level at which he would have to make a formal bid for the company.
Carroll's personal stake in Greencore is currently valued at more than €262 million, but he's not in the game to make sandwiches. Although he has never said so, what appears to interest him is Greencore's landbank of 900 acres, mainly in Carlow and in Mallow, Co Cork, where sites occupied by sugar factories once owned by the State are likely to be redeveloped.
He showed his mettle in a titanic struggle to wrest control of Dunloe Ewart from wily solicitor-developer Noel Smyth in 2002. And throughout, notoriously, he never communicated with Smyth, who said: "If you can imagine somebody spending €50 million to buy into your company and won't spend 10 cent on a phone call, that's what it is." Dunloe Ewart even had to sell such assets as the Bloomfield shopping centre in Dún Laoghaire, the Mill shopping centre in Clondalkin and its entire property portfolio in Belfast, which Smyth had spent 12 years building up, in a desperate effort to raise money to buy back shares in the company in order to stave off a hostile takeover.
But Carroll prevailed in the end. After a two-year struggle, his vehicle - appropriately named Rambridge - made a successful bid for Dunloe Ewart, in a transaction that valued the company at €197 million. The main beneficiaries were Dermot Desmond and Paschal Taggart, to whom Noel Smyth had already sold his 26 per cent stake. Thus, in November 2002, Carroll took over Dunloe Ewart and its valuable four-acre site on Sir John Rogerson's Quay, in Dublin's south docklands, on which Smyth had secured planning permission for a major mixed-use scheme of offices and apartments, and 412 acres at Cherrywood, in south Co Dublin, which Dunloe was to develop with British Land.
IT SEEMED LIGHTyears away from where he had started in 1989 with Fisherman's Wharf, a humdrum scheme of townhouses and apartment blocks just south of the East Link bridge, or the illiterate neoclassical block of flats he built at Portobello Harbour, facing the Grand Canal at Rathmines bridge, inaugurating the era of Zoe Developments Ltd.
Previously occupied by Brittain Motors, Portobello Harbour has no design or functional integrity, consisting of two terraces of single-aspect townhouses laid out back-to-back on the spine of the building; those on the canal frontage are four storeys high, with one room on each floor, stacked on top of each other and connected via narrow staircases.
Though it built more apartments in Dublin's inner city than all other developers combined, Zoe did not employ architects to design any of its earlier schemes. Instead, they were designed by Carroll himself and worked up by a team of technicians. Architects, he once claimed, were "only interested in designing penthouses for fellows with Mercs".
His real strength over the years has been site assembly. Every site he developed, often in run-down and unfashionable areas where property could be acquired cheaply, was assembled by him personally, rather than at arm's length through estate agents, and he would often go back again and again to reluctant vendors until he clinched a deal.
In a city with so many gaps that even crude urban dentistry was required, Carroll's arrival was welcomed by the planners, and he had no problem getting permission for blocks of shoebox flats in Arran Quay, Mountjoy Square, Usher's Quay, Bridge Street, Francis Street, Newmarket, Werburgh Street, Dorset Street and Brunswick Street.
More of the same followed in Gardiner Street, Green Street, Great Strand Street, Abbey Street Upper, Jervis Street and numerous other places. But even though Zoe had become the main engine of urban renewal in the inner city, the quality of its output was so poor that it prompted the Department of the Environment to issue new guidelines.
The 1995 apartment design guidelines set minimum standards for the size of flats as well as specifying a more varied mix of unit types in every scheme. But they came too late to prevent Bachelors Walk being subjected to the standard Zoe treatment - 335 apartments, of which 293 are single-bedroom units, laid out along narrow corridors.
It was only when Carroll was confronted with more complex schemes such as Charlotte Quay that he finally engaged architects O'Mahony Pike to design the 16-storey Millennium Tower and its flanking blocks. This move paid off well, with Zoe winning permission on appeal to retain four floors that the city planners had lopped off.
After James Masterson, a 24-year-old construction worker, fell to his death at Charlotte Quay in November 1997, Carroll was told by Mr Justice Peter Kelly in the High Court: "You are not entitled to make profit on the blood and lives of your workers. You are a disgrace to the construction industry and ought to be ashamed of yourself." Masterson's death was the third on a Zoe site and resulted in the company having to make a £100,000 donation to the poor box. After a two-hour meeting with the Health and Safety Authority, Carroll was asked if he had anything to say about the company's then appalling safety record. "We are committed to improving our sites," he said.
Around the same time, Zoe disappeared off the radar and was replaced by Danninger. Development plans had intensified after Carroll's 1996 purchase, for a then record £8 million, of the gasworks site off Barrow Street in Dublin, where the mix was to include 17,565 sq m (189,000 sq ft) of office space, 600 apartments and local shopping facilities.
More than 200 of the apartments, also designed by O'Mahony Pike, were built within the iron framework of a Victorian gasholder - a greedy nine storeys rather than a more generous eight. Curiously, these are still vacant and the building may be turned into a hotel. But Carroll let one of the office blocks to Google, undercutting his rivals.
Equally remarkable was his success in letting a second office block at Cherrywood to Dell in 2004 at a time when the vacancy rate for suburban offices was nearly 30 per cent. But he was slow to see the benefit of extending the Luas southwards from Sandyford and was the last developer in the area to contribute towards its capital cost.
CARROLL DIDN'T ALWAYSget his way. In 2004, he lost an appeal to An Bord Pleanála against South Dublin County Council's decision to impose a development levy of €5.5 million towards the provision of public infrastructure to serve a mixed scheme of 537 apartments, 15 retail units and a 140-bedroom hotel at Belgard Square, Tallaght.
A year later, he lost another appeal to An Bord Pleanála over revised plans by Danninger to convert the former convent buildings at Loreto Abbey, Rathfarnham, into offices. After buying the 12-acre site in 2000 for £14 million, his original plan was to convert them into a nursing home and build 10 apartment blocks in the wooded grounds.
Danninger also lost two High Court actions claiming that it had contracts to purchase two sites in the city centre. In a case involving Walden Motors in 2003, Mr Justice Kelly expressed surprise that it had ever been brought. And last February, a claim that Danninger had a contract to develop a Dublin Bus site on Abbey Street was dismissed.
Carroll suffered another setback last spring, when Dublin City Council rejected his plans for a major office development on the former Brooks Thomas timber yard at North Wall Quay, because of its "excessive bulk". A revised scheme was later agreed with the Dublin Docklands Development Authority; it is intended to house Anglo Irish Bank.
Much more ambitious is Carroll's plan for a huge mixed-use development of offices, shops and nearly 800 apartments in 10 blocks on South Bank Road in Ringsend - a 12-acre site he bought from AIB for more than £20 million in 2000. Among the local objectors was John Gormley TD, now Minister for the Environment and leader of the Green Party.
Last autumn, Carroll managed to persuade Bohemians soccer club to sign over the title to Dalymount Park in a deal worth €65 million - €40 million in cash, to be paid in instalments, plus a new 10,000-seat stadium at Harristown, near Dublin airport. And he will take all the risk in having the club's five-acre site in Phibsboro rezoned for development.
His first major venture outside Dublin was in Tralee, Co Kerry, where he has developed an extensive site along the south side of Dan Spring Road, which had been acquired by Dunloe Ewart from Monarch Properties. Formerly a swamp, it is now lined by apartment blocks terminating with the Fels Point Hotel, which Carroll owns and operates.
He is also developing the €120 million Parkway Valley shopping centre in Limerick, which will have a lettable floor area of 23,225 sq m (250,000 sq ft). It is being built alongside an existing retail park developed by Dunloe Ewart and will reinforce the unfortunate pattern of out-of-town shopping that is squeezing retail in the city centre.
