While the Barrett-Ronan vision, courage and drive for quality are acclaimed within the industry, tales of their 'obnoxious' behaviour are also rife, writes Kathy Sheridan
Even on notoriously volatile Planet Developer, no two men polarise opinion quite like the "terrible twins" who make up Treasury Holdings. "Of all the developers that have come to the fore in the past 20 years, Johnny Ronan and Richard Barrett are, more than any other, the terrible twins of the Celtic Tiger," says one who knows them. "When they are good, they are very, very good, but when they are bad, they are horrid."
Though born beyond the Pale, it was a long way from damp little cottages the two were reared. Ronan's entrepreneurial gene goes back at least three generations. In the 1930s and 1940s, his grandfather, John, was already dabbling in property while running a farm near Carrick-on-Suir, and a meat factory and leather business in Clonmel, Co Tipperary.
In the 1960s, his father, also John, was still farming while buying up attractive slices of Dublin around Waterloo Road and Pembroke Street. In the 1970s, Johnny himself was already striking property deals, with and without his father, while still a trainee accountant at Price Waterhouse Coopers.
He was only 26 when his father died suddenly in 1983, an event that, according to some, made him even more driven.
Richard Barrett also came from a comfortable background, the scion of a grain-importing family in Ballina, Co Mayo, who went on to study law at Trinity College Dublin and train as a barrister. He speaks fluent French and Spanish and is described by one industry professional as "the smartest man I ever met".
Having met as boarder-classmates at Castleknock College, the pair made an early attempt to work together in 1981, but were thwarted by the tenor of the times. Land could be bought but couldn't be developed because the banks had shut the tills. A few years later, when they met again as rivals for a property, they teamed up, buying prime sites and buildings in Blackrock and promptly re-selling them at a tidy profit, before moving on to Boland's Mill in 1986. This became the Treasury Building, so named even before it won a prestigious tenant in the form of the National Treasury Management Agency, and now also familiar to many as the nerve centre of Fianna Fáil's election efforts.
Treasury Holdings was founded in a deal done at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, and now forms the umbrella for a complex web of 500 companies, employing about 90 in Dublin, with plans for that number again in its Shanghai office by Christmas.
Their foresight and willingness to play a long game are exemplified in the Shanghai adventure, instigated when Barrett visited China in 2002.
Friends tell wry and hilarious tales of early efforts to adapt to Chinese business culture, involving relentless karaoke, 70-proof alcohol, and chicken toes for dinner. The Taoiseach's visit, to help seal the deal, was a resounding success, "semi-bewitching" all around him by doing what Bertie does, holding hands and gazing mesmerisingly into eyes unaccustomed to that sort of thing. Being FoBs (friends of Bertie) did not prevent Ronan from donating a generous €10,000 to Labour's Ruairí Quinn in 1998 while the latter was minister for finance, although Quinn promptly made it known that the cheque had been passed to the Labour Party's head office.
WHILE THE BARRETT-RONAN vision, courage and drive for quality are acclaimed and backed by a serious professional infrastructure (the board includes Kevin Kelly, formerly of Sisk, and Paddy Teahon), relationships with outsiders have been rather less elegant, riddled with tales of ruthlessness, litigation and generally "obnoxious" behaviour.
Many individuals and institutions rue the day they took on the formidable combination of Barrett's cool, calculating legal brain, and Ronan's ferocious drive and hot-headedness.
To one industry professional, Ronan, with his glossy black hair and beard, is nothing short of "a pirate king . . . fantastic, larger than life. He f***s and blinds people out of it. I admire the way he gets the bit between his teeth and pushes things on. We need people like that - with that absolute energy, drive and ambition. And he's a bit of crack, very likeable socially. He's one of the people you'd sit down and have a meal with."
To others, he is "the prince of darkness", "explosive", "light on manners and the social niceties".
The more "polished" half, as Richard Barrett is invariably described, regards tomes such as Irish Land Law as light holiday reading and is renowned for an ability to pounce on the small print of a folio.
The pair's litigiousness has become the stuff of legend. Journalist Neil Michael quotes a letter from Barrett to a property developer who had had a few run-ins with Treasury over a shopping mall project in the centre of Dublin. In it, Barrett pointed out, with cold understatement, that "certain opponents of ours have underestimated our ability to cause legal chaos to their detriment". It is reckoned that they have racked up as many as 35 legal cases, many against other developers.
When the iconic Bewley's of Grafton Street, housed in a building owned by a Treasury subsidiary, was threatened with being converted to a Topshop, Ciarán Cuffe, the Green TD, phoned Johnny Ronan to plead with him. "My memory of the conversation," says Cuffe, "was that he said 'business is business'. I was saddened that there didn't seem to be any interest in retaining a Dublin institution."
By contrast, at a personal level, Ronan is said to have a "good heart". Married to Mary and a father of three, he is known to be very supportive of the Irish Georgian Society and various children's charities, and has participated in gruelling cycling challenges in aid of the visually impaired. To help generate much-needed jobs back in his native county, he is driving an ambitious scheme for a biotechnology park in Carrick-on-Suir, located on a 325-acre site near the existing Merck Sharp & Dohme plant.
Meanwhile, he clearly enjoys the spoils of his buccaneering life, which include a mini-palazzo (dubbed "Saddam's Palace" by hostiles) on Burlington Road, a helicopter to ferry him to his country estate in Co Wicklow, with its stunning glass-and-steel summer house/party pad cantilevered out over the river, a €640,000 Maybach car, plus a Hummer jeep and a retinue of prominent socialites such as nightclub owner Robbie Fox, radio star Gerry Ryan and model Glenda Gilson.
Despite all this, sighs a professional acquaintance, "he simply couldn't understand why the papers were so interested in him at a time when the Hummer was almost permanently parked outside the Elephant & Castle".
MUCH OF BARRETT'S working life is now in Shanghai, but his elegant lifestyle includes a tasteful house on Leeson Street, a villa in Ibiza, and lately, a house off London's Berkeley Square.
In Dublin, he eschews the clubs for the more sedate surroundings of Town Bar & Grill. It was Barrett who persuaded Gordon Ramsay to set up a restaurant in the new Ritz-Carlton at Powerscourt, after having what he called "the best meal of my life" in Ramsay's restaurant in Tokyo.
At 53, the terrible twins show no signs of a slowdown, although Ronan is training his 23-year-old son - another John Ronan - into the business. "He wears a hairstyle just like his dad," says a friend, "and they go around town like the Men in Black".