Manor Park Homes is offering Clontarf Golf Club members €125,000 each in a bid to see off rival Capel Developments in the race to buy the organisation's property in Dublin. Barry O'Halloranreports.
Manor Park has upped its previous cash offer for the club by 25 per cent ahead of a crunch meeting tonight at which the 600 members will vote on the Capel offer, which is worth about €100,000 to each of them. Both developers have offered cash and land swap deals to the club in an effort to buy its land, which is situated within three miles of Dublin's city centre, and bordered by rail and bus routes.
If either offer succeeds, it would be the first time that golf club members have received cash on the sale of their land.
Capel's offer includes a payment to the members, a lump sum to the club and the Portmarnock Links course and facilities in north Co Dublin, which the developer owns. The entire package is valued at €125 million.
Capel is underpinning its offer with a non-refundable €1 million deposit. Its offer depends on Clontarf's land being rezoned so it can be built on, and transferred to Capel.
It cannot be rezoned until 2011, when Dublin City Council draws up its next development plan. The whole process is likely to take four to five years.
Manor Park is offering the enhanced payment to members, worth around €100 million, a lump sum to the club and a newly-built and designed course and clubhouse on one-time Taoiseach Charles Haughey's former home in Kinsealy, north Dublin.
It is prepared to cement the deal with a non-refundable €3 million deposit which one of its shareholders, Joe Moran, has personally guaranteed.
The developer already has outline planning permission for the Kinsealy course. It is offering the club an input into its design, but will have to get local authority approval for the finalised plans.
Kinsealy amounts to 164 acres, while Portmarnock comes to 150. However, Manor Park is also seeking the right to build houses on 47 sites there.
Dublin City Council owns 62 acres of Clontarf, and councillors recently warned that both sides have ignored the authority's interests. The terms of its lease to Clontarf prevent it from being used for anything other than a golf course, while it is zoned as open land. Any redevelopment of the land would require the council to waive this term.
Crumlin-based Capel is backed by developers Eddie Keegan, John O'Connor and Liam Kelly. Joe Moran and industrial holdings company, DCC, jointly own Manor Park.
Tonight is the deadline for Clontarf members to vote on the Capel offer. If it fails to get the necessary two-thirds majority support, the offer will lapse, and Manor Park will emerge the likely winner.
Members last night said that they wanted more leeway to consider both offers, particularly in light of the fact that the latest Manor Park bid only materialised this week. No club officials were available yesterday.
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