He has given up acting but you wonder if the story of Seán Quinn might tempt Daniel Day-Lewis to try on a tweed farmer’s jacket and Fermanagh accent. The first episode chronicling the rise and fall of the Quinn business empire, as told in Trevor Birney’s Quinn Country (RTÉ One, Monday, 9.35pm), has the epic sprawl of a Hollywood tragedy. It is a tale of ambition, hubris and enough concrete to pave Ireland several times over.
Quinn built his own Xanadu – a 14,700 sq ft complex with putting green, swimming pool and cinema – amid the lakes of Fermanagh. That mansion served as backdrop to a Shakespearean melodrama as he raised a multibillion-euro fiefdom out of the blasted heaths of Border Country and then gambled it all away when the Celtic Tiger entered its fever-dream stage. It’s There Will Be Blood played out on the stony grey soil of a part of the world forgotten by Dublin, London and Belfast.
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Quinn’s downfall and the horrors that followed will be covered in parts two and three of a film made with the co-operation of the businessman but which he has now disavowed. The first episode tells the origin story and – for all Quinn’s objections – leaves itself open to the charge of humanising its subject and potentially straying towards puff piece.
‘While there were GAA links, he was not in the pocket of politicians and that sense of being an outsider seems to have been part of his motivation’
We are introduced to Quinn and his wife Patricia sitting in what looks like a humble home. If angry at what they’ve been through, what’s most striking is their ordinariness. You half expect them to bring up the death notices or mention that they saw your old friend from school down the town the other day. JR Ewing plunged into a Martin McDonagh tragicomedy.
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That dad-from-up-the-road unstarriness belies Quinn’s ruthlessness. Having decided in the 1960s school was not for him he started out supplying gravel in Cavan and Fermanagh from his local farm. Unusually for an Irish entrepreneur of that time, he didn’t have many connections. While there were GAA links, he was not in the pocket of politicians and that sense of being an outsider seems to have been part of his motivation.
The business he created was forged in his own image – and of the society that had shaped him. Inevitably, then, Quinn Country is as much a portrait of the border region as of Quinn.
“Part of the problem in the north was that you had very good land next to very bad land and the Protestants had all the good land,” says author Colm Tóibín, who met Quinn at the height of his success and was alarmed to discover he’d started dabbling in shares. “The Catholics sat there on their 20 acres of stony grey soil. Seán Quinn started to make money from the very thing which had caused the poverty, the sandy nature of the soil.”
‘In part one the picture painted is of an outsider who conjured mind-boggling wealth out of nothing ... and who then flew too close to the sun, his empire collapsing as he tumbled earthward’
He had soon moved on to manufacturing concrete and buying pubs across Dublin. However, it was with Quinn Insurance that he entered the billionaire league. Was it then something changed in him? “Most people who speak about themselves in the third person have huge egos,” says former Minister for Finance Alan Dukes. “The ego is so big I have to admire myself.”
Tragedy enters the narrative with the arrival of the buccaneering Seán FitzPatrick – another outsider taking on the system on his own terms – and Anglo Irish Bank. Quinn made a huge bet by investing in Anglo. When the bank crashed, it took Quinn with it.
The ensuing downfall and its aftermath will be chronicled across two further episodes on Tuesday and Wednesday. In part one the picture painted is of an outsider who conjured mind-boggling wealth out of nothing other than rock, rubble and a sense of manifest destiny. And who then flew too close to the sun, his empire collapsing as he tumbled earthward.
[ Quinn Country part 2: It’s like Shakespeare meets Father Ted meets The Big ShortOpens in new window ]
Quinn Country continues on RTÉ 1 at 9.35pm tonight and tomorrow
