How a Clare man took on Dublin

The Big Developers:Bernard McNamara's Dublin portfolio includes a Ringsend site so large it could fit a new city quarter, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor

You see the bright blue and yellow signs on big construction sites all over the place: "Better Built by McNamara." The name McNamara is also likely to be emblazoned along tower cranes lifting long steel beams or huge buckets of concrete for the builders, Michael McNamara and Company Ltd.

The blue-and-yellow livery is no accident - it's also Clare's GAA colours; the late Michael McNamara was a Clare man, from Lisdoonvarna.

The firm he established is now run by his son, Bernard, who is not only one of the most successful building contractors in the State, but also a prolific property developer and investor.

He's been involved in a splurge of acquisitions within the past year, including the Burlington Hotel (bought for €288 million), Carrisbrook House in Ballsbridge (€46 million), and the Irish Glass Bottle site in Ringsend (€412 million), in a deal backed by financier Derek Quinlan and the Dublin Docklands Development Authority (DDDA).

McNamara also led the consortium that bought the Shelbourne Hotel on St Stephen's Green for about €140 million and then spent nearly €90 million on a lavish refurbishment of the property, adding 75 bedrooms to give it 265. Last February, he spearheaded the group that bought the Montrose Hotel on Stillorgan Road for more than €40 million.

This group, Select Retail Holdings, includes his Shelbourne partners Jerry O'Reilly and David Courtney, as well as Simon Burke, who formerly headed Hamleys toy store chain in Britain. It had already bought Superquinn's chain of 21 supermarkets in January 2005 for almost €450 million, and sold six of the properties for €142 million last May.

Last January, the highly-acquisitive Clare man purchased a 45 per cent stake in the Conrad Hotel, on Earlsfort Terrace, for around €45 million, having snapped up the Great Southern Hotel in Parknasilla, Co Kerry, the previous summer for almost €40 million. He also controls the Mercer Hotel in Dublin and co-owns the Radisson hotel in Galway.

His company continues to win lucrative construction contracts. He heads the Leargas consortium named last April as the preferred bidder to build a new prison at Thornton Hall, in north Co Dublin, to replace Mountjoy. His partners in this public-private partnership deal are Barclays Private Equity and GSL, which runs prisons in Britain, South Africa and Australia.

McNamara didn't get where he is today without being tough. Back in 1999, he had no hesitation in hiking the rent in Corrib Village, a student housing complex catering for NUI Galway, by nearly 28 per cent. The rooms "still represent value in terms of what you would get in Galway. If the market is too high, it's something I can't control."

Irish Intercontinental Bank was another victim of the boom. In May 2000, the bank agreed to pay £60 million for a new headquarters building to be developed by McNamara on a site at Grand Canal Dock. Five months later, he said negotiations "have fallen foul of the current property boom, with values in this prime location increasingly daily".

There were other fish to fry. In partnership with Jerry O'Reilly, McNamara developed Bishops Court on Upper Kevin Street and pre-let it to the State, as overflow offices for the Department of Foreign Affairs. He also got on with the Exchange, an office scheme in Tallaght, which enjoyed the benefits of urban renewal tax write-offs.

In March 2001, after O'Reilly paid a then record price of €46 million for a 14.5-acre site on Merrion Road, beside Elm Park Golf Club, McNamara joined him as a 50-50 partner in Radora Developments to plan a new future for this choice property in Dublin 4. The initial idea was a private hospital, to cash in on new tax incentives for such facilities.

It became much more ambitious, however. Apart from a private hospital, the scheme came to include 330 apartments, 100 terraced houses, more than 30,000sq m of offices and an eight-storey hotel in an open landscaped setting - all designed by cutting-edge architects Bucholz McEvoy, who had won accolades for Fingal County Hall.

Radora subsequently bought the adjoining Tara Towers Hotel for €14 million and had plans to add a further 60 bedrooms to bring the number up to 160. But this radical scheme, also by Bucholz McEvoy, ran into strong opposition, because it would have involved replacing the tired old hotel with a 25-storey building much taller than Liberty Hall.

Not only did Dublin City Council refuse permission for the proposed development, but this was backed up by An Bord Pleanála last May. In its ruling, the appeals board said the new tower on a restricted site would be "visually intrusive" alongside Dublin Bay and would "set an undesirable precedent for similar development at such locations".

More than 30 Booterstown residents had objected to the scheme. One resident of Dornden Park claimed the high-rise tower would be "an alien erection against an otherwise beautiful landscape". Cllr Eugene Regan, then cathaoirleach of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, described it rather more diplomatically as "unacceptable".

But McNamara and O'Reilly can take pride in the scale of what has been built at Elm Park. The office blocks are radically different to anything else built in Dublin - not only naturally ventilated, but also raised on stilts to give unobstructed views across the beautifully landscaped site. The standard of the apartments and townhouses is also well above average.

Radora clinched a deal with insurance company Friends First for one of the Elm Park office blocks, raking in €45 million in up-front funding for the development. The eight-storey block, which overlooks the golf club, comes with access for all employees to amenities on the site, including a gym, heated swimming pool, restaurant, bar and coffee shops.

Meanwhile, McNamara's buying spree continued. In October 2004, he paid more than €23 million for a seven-acre site with town centre zoning in Navan, Co Meath - the highest price ever for land in this fast-growing commuter town. Ten months earlier, he bought a 1.25-acre site at Fair Green, near Galway's Ceannt station, for about €6 million.

McNamara led one of the three groups bidding for the National Conference Centre, with Leopardstown Race Course as the proposed site, but pulled out of the contest in March 2005. He was also among the under-bidders for the Bank of Ireland headquarters on Baggot Street, bought for €200 million by rivals Landmark Developments and Quinlan Private.

But when the bank off-loaded 36 of its branches in a sale-and-leaseback deal, he managed to buy three of them - at Arran Quay, Merrion Row and Upper Leeson Street - for his personal pension fund.

He also led a consortium that bought the Champion Sports retail chain for €60 million from Paddy McKillen and Paul McGlade, who built it up.

He ran into local opposition over plans to replace many of the buildings of St Bricin's former military hospital on Infirmary Road with 227 apartments. He's also leading the redevelopment of adjoining O'Devaney Gardens, a former Dublin City Council "sink estate", to provide a good mix of private and social or affordable housing.

His biggest coup was to put together the consortium that bought the 24-acre Irish Glass Bottle site in October 2006, with the DDDA as one of his partners. Not only was the deal arranged to minimise stamp duty, but having the authority on board virtually guaranteed that the redevelopment of the site would be exempt from planning control.

McNamara raised the bulk of his €57.5 million stake through loan stock placed with Davy Stockbrokers, whose memo to clients noted that the DDDA had "fast-track planning powers, which guarantees the authority's ability to make things happen for its development partners". The deal was also backed by a €288 million Anglo Irish Bank loan.

Given that the DDDA's then chairman, Lar Bradshaw, was a director of Anglo Irish, and that the bank's chief executive, Sean FitzPatrick, was on the DDDA's board, the authority issued a statement saying it operates within a strict code of conduct on conflicts of interest and, in this case, it had a long-standing interest in seeing the Poolbeg peninsula redeveloped.

The former Irish Glass Bottle site is so large that it could accommodate a whole new city quarter, including new homes for up to 10,000 people and all the local facilities they would need. But it's unlikely to be the "mini-Manhattan" that the PDs had in mind for Dublin Port, and the area will also need to be protected from the effects of climate change.

Other major projects include the Greystones New Quarter, on the southern end of this burgeoning Co Wicklow town, in collaboration with the Durkan Group; it will involve relocating a mile-long stretch of the Dublin-Rosslare railway line. McNamara also has a contract to build a €1.7 billion coal-fired power station in Tamil Nadu, southern India.

One of his immediate priorities is to devise a scheme that would be acceptable to Dublin City Council's planners to redevelop the Burlington Hotel, occupying a site of almost four acres with frontages on Upper Leeson Street, Sussex Road and Burlington Road, plus the adjoining 1.3-acre Allianz site, which he acquired early this year for €100 million.

The slab-like hotel, developed in the early 1970s by PV Doyle, was due to close in January 2008, but its 500 rooms and functions business are so profitable that McNamara is likely to keep it open, at least in the short-term, until plans are finalised for the site. With both Jurys Ballsbridge and the Berkeley Court closed, the Burlington is even more in demand.

As for Carrisbrook House, nobody would mourn its passing. A cheap-looking hexagonal block from 1968, its only remaining tenant is the Israeli embassy. If McNamara is to win planning approval, the best strategy would be to propose a fine piece of architecture that would celebrate the pivotal junction of Pembroke and Northumberland roads.