The redevelopment of Dublin’s former Glass Bottle site, stalled for years after the Celtic Tiger’s collapse, received a fresh impetus this week as its owners – US private equity giant Oaktree and developer Johnny Ronan – secured a €415 million funding line from Deutsche Bank.
The developers of the 37-acre site said it “kick-starts an exciting new stage” of the part-built project, where ground was first broken in 2023. It will ultimately deliver about 4,000 homes.
Across the mouth of the Liffey, however, another large plot coveted during the bubble era remains as far from being redeveloped as ever.
The speculative potential of Irish Continental Group’s (ICG) 34-acre container facility at Dublin Port, held under a long-term lease, drew interest in 2007 from developer Liam Carroll and a consortium led by Philip Lynch’s One51 and Doyle Shipping, which accumulated stakes in the company and battled its chief executive, Eamonn Rothwell, in a takeover struggle.
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It ultimately concluded, as Irish stock market followers will remember, in a stalemate. Rothwell’s rivals were subsequently forced to sell their shares – crystallising large losses – during the financial crisis to pay down debt.
And while the chief executive has never mounted another bid to take the company private, his stake in the business has risen by close to 50 per cent over the past decade. On Monday, ICG disclosed that it had reached 21.65 per cent. That’s worth about €212 million.
And that surge has been driven not by the use of Rothwell’s money, but the company’s.
Over the past six years alone, ICG has spent more than €200 million buying back its own stock and cancelling the shares. This was capped with a €35 million transaction last month to buy out and retire most of the shares of ICG’s previous second-largest investor, Kinney Asset Management, led by Irishman Peter Kinney out of Chicago. (Kinney did not respond to a request for comment on the sale.)
To be sure, ICG’s repurchases have consistently been at significant discounts to the price targets that analysts have on the stock – indicating they’ve been a smart use of cash.
Some of Rothwell stake increase has also been down to stock awards and the exercise of share options though the chief executive has cashed in some of these. For example, he sold €3.6 million of stock last March after exercising stock options, earning a profit of €1.1 million in the process.
But with Rothwell – who has led ICG for the past 35 years, making him the longest-standing chief executive on the Iseq – set to turn 71 this year, followers are increasingly wondering about his end game.
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Shares in ICG have rallied by a third over the past five years, breaching the €6 level for the first time last month, and emerging as one of the fastest Iseq starters in the early days of 2026 trading. However, changing hands at about €6.30 apiece, they are only 5 per cent higher than they were in early 2018.
During the intervening period, ICG has been dogged by a weaker sterling exchange rate which is a hangover from the 2016 Brexit vote, a share price mauling in 2018 amid delays in the delivery of the new build WB Yeats ferry and technical issues with its Ulysses vessel, the Covid-19 pandemic and implementation of the UK-EU divorce deal in 2020.
Analysts reckon the stock has yet to be fully rewarded for some opportunistic moves Rothwell took by chasing duty-free sales and setting up a route between Dover and Calais in the wake of Brexit.
“The move to enter the Dover-Calais route, alongside the return of duty-free shopping on the Irish Sea, has seen revenue in the ferries division increase by just over 100 per cent since 2019 to €434 million in 2024,” said Goodbody Stockbrokers analyst Dudley Shanley, in a recent report, in which he set an €8 price target on the stock.
Achieving that price objective would enable the company’s market valuation to sail through the €1 billion mark and head rapidly towards €1.2 billion.
Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Aaron Dempsey highlighted Rothwell’s nimbleness in a note to clients this week, saying a 5 per cent decline in cars on its ferries in the first 10 months of last year was the result of a “deliberate strategic shift by ICG to reduce sailings on the Dover–Calais route, which typically generates lower-margin car traffic, while reallocating capacity towards the higher-value Ireland–France routes”.
While net debt jumped 50 per cent during the 10 months to €242 million as a result of the purchases of the MS James Joyce cruise ferry, which had previously been on charter to the group, and another container ship, analysts reckon that this will gradually decline.
“Having achieved its long-standing goal of full ownership of its fleet, ICG enters a phase of reduced capital intensity,” said Shanley. “With limited near-term demands on cash flow, it is well-positioned to prioritise debt reduction and shareholder returns.”
This would likely include more money being spent on share buy-backs – further boosting Rothwell’s interest.
The problem with ICG continually buying back and cancelling shares – a fifth of its shares have been retired over the past decade – is that it contributes to the lack of liquidity in a stock that is already tightly held by Rothwell and a group of long-term investors. This contributes to the company being permanently undervalued on the stock market, according to some observers.
This has stoked perennial speculation that it will ultimately be taken over by a deep-pocketed European infrastructure fund – providing a clean exit for Rothwell and others.
Investors who have bought in over the years on such hopes, however, are still waiting. Rothwell, as ever, is keeping his cards close to his chest – declining to comment on Friday, through a spokeswoman.
Some shareholders have little patience for the guessing game. “We’re not in this for a transaction,” said one investor. “In my view, Eamonn is the most underrated CEO of any Irish plc.”
