The Sligo-born engineer and property developer, Mr Tom Gilmartin, was something of a mystery man when his name first surfaced in Dublin in the late 1980s. Even by then, he had been living and working in Britain for 30 years, running his affairs from a base in Luton.
At the time, he was assembling a 180-acre site at Quarryvale, in west Dublin, for the development of a huge retail complex modelled on the Metrocentre in Tyneside and other out-of-town shopping centres in the UK, which were much in vogue during the Thatcher era.
Long before the first phase of the M50 opened to traffic in March 1990, Mr Gilmartin had identified Quarryvale as Dublin's most strategic location for a regional-scale shopping centre because it was at the fulcrum of the motorway bypass and the main road leading west.
His plans, eventually unveiled at a media presentation in Dublin's Berkeley Court Hotel, co-ordinated by a London PR agency, called for the installation on the site of Ireland's largest shopping centre; it was to contain almost two million square feet of retail space, with parking for 10,000 cars.
This would have made Quarry vale some five times larger than the St Stephen's Green shopping centre, opened in 1988, and three times the size of The Square shopping centre in Tallaght, which began trading in 1990 with the benefit of lucrative urban renewal tax incentives.
Mr Padraig Flynn, then Minister for the Environment, had yielded to representations from Monarch Properties, which developed The Square, that such favourable tax treatment was needed to make that project viable. Mr Gilmartin was hoping to win the same benefit.
At the time, it was known that he was lobbying Mr Flynn. They had several meetings in the Minister's office at Leinster House and elsewhere. Both of them were "men of the west" and talked the same language; indeed, Mr Gilmartin still spoke in an unaltered Sligo accent.
While the issue of urban renewal designation was being discussed, the Luton-based developer scored his most significant coup when he paid Dublin Corporation £5.5 million for 50 acres of industrial-zoned land at Quarryvale in January 1990; this was the final piece of the jigsaw.
Given the likelihood that any megascale retail magnet at Quarryvale would have a damaging impact on shopping in the city centre, from which the Dublin Corporation still draws much of its rates revenue, the sale of the 50-acre site to Mr Gilmartin seemed to be a case of the corporation shooting itself in the foot.
In a telephone interview at the time, Mr Gilmartin defended his scheme by saying that he had seen more than enough Irish emigrants "sleeping on the streets of London" and he wanted to "end this human cargo" by giving them jobs at home. Making money was not his primary concern, he said.
As if trying to keep his own feet in both camps, the Sligo-born developer also became involved in assembling a substantial site at Bachelors Walk and Lower Ormond Quay for another large shopping centre, this one to contain almost one million square feet of retail space on three levels.
This scheme, as later refined by Arlington Securities (a subsidiary of British Aerospace), was to have had parking for 1,000 cars at basement level and a central bus station on the roof - an unusual arrangement which created "civic design problems", as the corporation conceded.
Ultimately, nothing came of Mr Gilmartin's or Arlington's speculative site assembly there - even though the scheme was actively facilitated by the corporation. The Bachelors Walk portion of the site was acquired by Zoe Developments, which built more than 300 apartments there.
The biggest hurdle which Mr Gilmartin faced in Quarryvale was that the 180-acre site he had assembled was not zoned for what he had in mind - and changing the zoning to permit a motorway shopping centre was going to be difficult, because it meant overturning the county plan.
As long ago as 1972, another site south of Neilstown had been earmarked to provide a "town centre" for Lucan/Clondalkin which the planners envisaged as merging to form a "new town" with a population in excess of 100,000. However, it was relatively remote from the M50.
Not long after Mr Gilmartin became involved, it is known that he had meetings with leading powerbrokers on Dublin County Council, including Mr Liam Lawlor TD, about how the scheme could be advanced. But its massive scale posed a real risk that the whole project could backfire.
Mr Gilmartin entered into partnership with Mr Owen O'Call aghan, the Cork-based property developer, with a view to making progress on Quarryvale. With Mr O'Callaghan came Mr Ambrose Kelly, who ran a very busy design practice, and Mr Frank Dunlop, the PR consultant.
Their success in persuading key councillors to go along with the scheme prompted the Green Property Company to call a press conference in the run-up to the 1991 local elections, at which its then managing director, Mr John Corcoran, launched an unprecedented attack on the rezoners.
Mr Corcoran warned publicly that the rezoning of Quarryvale, particularly if it was accompanied by urban renewal tax incentives, would undermine the viability of the town centre for Blanchardstown which his company was about to develop, after years of delay.
The Green Property Company's intervention added to public disquiet about land rezoning in Co Dublin; at least 12 serving councillors who had been at the forefront of rezoning controversies - including Mr Lawlor - lost their seats in the subsequent election.
With Mr O'Callaghan now fronting the Quarryvale operation - he was eventually to buy out Mr Gilmartin's interest or, rather, his accumulated bank debt to AIB - the county council finally agreed to a rezoning under which its retail content was "capped" at 250,000 square feet.
Even at the time, in December 1993, it was widely anticipated that this "cap" would not hold. Earlier this year, after the Duke of Westminster and other major investors became involved in the project, South Dublin County Council lifted the cap to allow for future expansion.
Now called the Liffey Valley Shopping Centre, the first phase is due to open later this month. However, Mr O'Callaghan seems to have shelved plans to build a "national stadium" on the original Neilstown site - a proposal that was meant to be part of the Quarryvale package.
There was also a direct link between Quarryvale and a 1989 Garda investigation into irregularities in the planning process. On that occasion Mr Gilmartin himself made a number of allegations which raised questions about the integrity of the planning process.
This aspect of the investigation got nowhere because Mr Gil martin refused to make a statement to the gardai.