Sean Quinn is the richest Irishman, building an empire on cement, insurance and hotels. This week he created 1,000 new jobs, yet most people wouldn't know him if he passed them on the street. Kate Holmquist reports on a reclusive billionaire
Thirty-three years ago, in the thick of the Troubles, a 26-year-old school drop-out was working his father's Border farm, mowing hay, caring for livestock - the simple life. Yet life was anything but.
Living in Derrylin, Co Fermanagh, a few kilometres north of Co Cavan, he was surrounded by bitter parochial and political rivalries. There were, as today, the low hills, the hectares of dark lakes and rivers streaming to the Shannon, the thankless fields, the unfarmable marshland and the stoical silence of people who learned to keep their counsel not just for privacy, but for survival. Tourists avoided the area and the young emigrated, shifted themselves out to Dublin or gave themselves up to the conflict that was destined to rage for the next couple of decades.
Seán Quinn saw his future differently. On his father's 23-acre farm, there was a quarry - a ragged scar ripped into the landscape. In this ugliness Quinn saw a beautiful goldmine.
In 1973, Quinn took out a £100 loan, sunk a well, extracted the gravel, washed it and sold it on to local contractors at a profit. From that came Quinn Cement, the base on which he built his wealth. Today, he is the richest Irish-born entrepreneur and ranks 292 on the Forbes list of the world's 793 billionaires.
Quinn, worth an estimated $2.5 billion (€1.9 billion) according to Forbes, is listed beside the Prada family, Luciano Benetton and David Rockefeller Sr. (The Irish-based heir to the Campbell Soup fortune, John Dorrance III, is ranked alongside him but is American-born and took up Irish citizenship after moving here in 1994.)
Quinn leaves fellow Irish billionaires Sir Anthony O'Reilly (his $1.4 billion, or €1.1 billion, puts him alongside Oprah Winfrey at 562) and Dermot Desmond (746 with $1 billion, or €0.78 billion) in the shade. Other publications have estimated Quinn's fortune at up to €5 billion.
Like 450 of the other billionaires on the Forbes list, 59-year-old Quinn is a self-made man who, they say, has brought the American Dream to west Cavan and Fermanagh. "I shudder to think what this area would have become without Seán Quinn," says one local.
In his epic poem The Great Hunger, Patrick Kavanagh describes Northern Catholics living on the Border as bitter, chaste, priest-fearing, gambling and parochially myopic peasantry. But unlike Kavanagh's unambitious farmer, Quinn didn't milk the sleek cows, then "sit on a wooden gate, sit on a wooden gate, sit on a wooden gate and not give a damn".
This is a man who has perched on the fence long enough only to contemplate his next swift move in the inexorable rise of his empire. He is audacious and aggressive in his business tactics and intolerant of failure. In Derrylin, one observer says he is admired because "he doesn't care who you are, what gender you are or what background you come from as long as you can do the business".
WHEN QUINN DRIVES his unassuming SUV between Derrylin and Cavan's Ballyconnell, he might feel a certain pride that the new homes springing up like mushrooms are a sign of the healthy commerce he has brought. He might feel a sense of achievement in having created thousands of jobs not just in his home area, but - announced this week - a further 1,000 in Cavan, Navan, Co Meath and Blanchardstown, Dublin 15. Or, he might not. It's hard to say because Quinn is probably the most secretive and enigmatic entrepreneur in the country.
He declined to be interviewed and he prefers not to be photographed. He did not attend Thursday's Enterprise Ireland press conference to announce the creation of the new jobs by his insurance company Quinn Direct. His only son, Seán Quinn Jr (one of five adult children, three of whom are involved in the business) was present in his father's stead but did not speak and refused to be photographed.
Little is known about Quinn Sr's wife Patricia and four daughters - Colette, Ciara, Aoife and Brenda. A protective court of loyal company people won't talk.
A possible explanation for his reticence is that he has a stereotypical Border personality - clannish and loyal. Of all the Kavanagh lines, this one seems to sum up Quinn the best: "Lost is the man who thinks that he can scorn/ his parish mother's paps. The greatest sage/ may not reject his people's heritage."
Because, even now that he owns hotels in the UK and eastern Europe, while flying around the world in his $24 million Dassault Falcon private jet, his focus remains the local pub in Derrylin or Ballyconnell, the GAA, the quarry. Quinn's dark, stern, straight eyebrows and stony expression belie his reputation as a "happy recluse", who limits his social life to occasional poker games and credits the GAA with providing his first business contacts.
Quinn played football for Fermanagh with his brother, Peter, former GAA president, and the Quinn Group's inter-firm GAA team is a source of pride. He is said to owe much of his success to the talent he recruits and to regard himself as the business equivalent of a Premiership manager, scouting for the best and paying whatever it takes to get them.
They also say that he's a typical Border man in that he will find out as much as possible about you, your ideas, your loyalties, your personality, before he'll offer any view of his own. He will seem unassuming, pushing others into the limelight, but he won't forget a word you said and will refer to it later on, surprising you with his alacrity.
He doesn't keep grand offices and his home next to the Slieve Russell Hotel, one of many he owns, is a fine and comfortable one, but certainly not that of a typical billionaire. He parks his SUV wherever he can in the Quinn Direct car park in Ballyconnell, first come first serve.
Most of his enterprises are boringly practical: concrete, plastics, glass, radiators, roof tiles, tarmac, windfarms - everything tied to the land and the new housing and roads that are changing it forever.
HE WENT INTO insurance when the cost of his own corporate liability insurance grew so large that he wanted to find a way to do it cheaper. And the glamour end of his business - the hotels, golf courses and leisure facilities in Ireland, the UK and eastern Europe - help provide corporate entertainment and advertise the Quinn brand in new business regions.
He is so meticulously proud of the golf course at the Slieve Russell hotel that he personally bends down to feel the texture of the grass to make sure it's perfect, even though - they say - he doesn't really play golf. The Slieve Russell is known locally as "Jesus", because the common reaction of strangers who suddenly see it pop up before them in the Cavan countryside is to take the name of the Lord in vain. In one of his few personal remarks, Quinn has shared the memory that, as a boy, he and his brother Peter mowed the very fields that now form the splendid golf course, which adds mightily to the mythology.
His attempt to buy the Wentworth Golf Course in Surrey, England, failed very publicly when his offer for the venue, which has hosted the Ryder Cup, was beaten at the last minute by that of a British consortium. Quinn turned around and quietly spent £186 million (€276 million) on the De Vere Belfry, near Birmingham, which hosted the Ryder Cup in 2002. In May of this year, it staged the Quinn Direct British Masters tournament.
He may like a game of poker, but in business he has taken few risks that didn't make him money. His audacious challenge to the insurance establishment was resisted by the industry, moving him to go on the record, uncharacteristically, to allege that the insurance "monopoly" (his term) had spread misinformation about Quinn Direct. However, the company more than doubled its profits between 2004 and 2005. The consumer seemed to appreciate a David willing to take on a Goliath, even though Quinn is actually a Goliath himself, a status he further enhanced by purchasing a 20 per cent stake in NCB stockbrokers.
Yet he seems to see himself as the beleaguered little guy. In 2000, the Quinn Group told The Irish Times in a statement to the editor: "We believe Seán Quinn as an individual and the Group in general has suffered more than any other Irish company in its efforts to enter markets controlled by monopolies in the various industries which it operates. The Group's history shows that we have never been afraid of competition, not afraid to break the mould in Irish business by taking on well-established players."
WHEN QUINN FIRST conceived of a cement factory in the 1980s, he was, the Quinn Group stated, "confronted with strong systematic and sophisticated industry opposition". He accused the industry of bringing pressure on banks not to support him; objecting to his planning applications; preventing some major international cement plant suppliers supplying him with technology; and making representations to the Northern Ireland Industrial Development Board to restrict grant aid.
The glass industry, too, "opposed us vigorously on many fronts". These statements were made in the context of Quinn's failed attempt in 1999-2000 to block a Co Meath cement plant planned by a competitor, the Lagan Group. A High Court judge struck out proceedings taken by the Quinn Group against Lagan Cement, after he found the action was mounted in "a cynical, calculated and unscrupulous fashion" for the sole purpose of inflicting damage on a competitor. It was revealed that the Quinn Group had stealthily donated IR£30,000 to a local group opposing the Lagan plan, by writing cheques through one of its pubs, the Barge.
Quinn told The Irish Times that he regretted this "mistake". A keen student of what Kavanagh called "the Experience college," Quinn learns from his mistakes and has honed his timing, if not his golf swing, to perfection. He takes pains to avoid media attention and cares deeply about his reputation: "We would like to think that our Group is known in all its business' (sic) as being honourable and treating our word as our bond," The Irish Times was told.
The Quinn Group is a private family-owned conglomerate - a deeply unfashionable business model these days. Business boffins are asking not if, but when, the Quinn Group will float some of its divisions, if not the whole company. And when that happens, his competitors will be queuing to analyse his financial story, doubtlessly hoping to reveal the secrets of success of a man who has become not just the richest Irish man, but also one of the most fascinating.