Modest Corkonian driven into clean-up campaign

Tom Cavanagh talks rubbish with passion. As chairman of Irish Business Against Litter (IBAL) he is at the forefront of a campaign to clean up Ireland. He, and the organisation he formed, which is supported by Golden Vale, Greencore, Texaco and Irish Distillers, firmly believe there is a direct link between environmental cleanliness and economic prosperity.

Only last week, Mr Cavanagh was berating the Government for its inaction on tackling the problem, despite pre-election promises. This time, he used the letters pages of The Irish Times to do so. A youthful 66 years old, Mr Cavanagh is no crank. A highly-successful businessman who once ran the biggest Ford car dealership in the country, he is a part-owner of the equally successful Conrad Hotel in Dublin and a former board member of Allied Irish Bank.

The Cork-born businessman is probably one of Ireland's most successful and well-respected among business figures. But although highly regarded among his peers, he actively dodges the limelight. He makes an exception only for his current project, IBAL.

Ireland, he says, has got to maintain its green image to enhance tourism revenue, attract overseas investment and create jobs. But that image, he believes is more perception than reality.

He argues that to attract and retain foreign investment, the country must be clean. He is appalled by the Irish attitude to litter.

He firmly believes laws with strict penalties for dumping should be enforced.

Mr Cavanagh believes the political will to grasp the problem and properly enforce litter laws is not there at present. He says politicians seem to have lost some of their self-esteem through the various scandals which have emerged in recent years. He says they prefer to go the "coaxing route" and distribute the goodies rather than introduce laws to tackle the litter problem.

Mr Cavanagh and IBAL are prepared to back their case with cash. Waterford has been promised a £1 million advance factory if it can prove it is litter-free by next May.

A number of initiatives to try to achieve this are already in train. It was while on holidays in Lahinch Co Clare, that Mr Cavanagh first decided to tackle the litter problem. He said he used to become upset when he saw the amount of litter being thrown around.

He devotes a considerable amount of time to his chairmanship of IBAL. Now officially retired, his business career began and continued in Cork.

Born in Fermoy where he still lives, he went to study for a BComm at University College Cork. He later began a teaching career and was about to go to the US to take up a post there when his father became very ill.

Having taken advice he felt he had no option but to take over his father's business, then a small car dealership in Cork. He had no interest in cars and could not even drive.

Over the years he developed the business, known as Cavanagh's of Fermoy Ltd, to the point where he employed 300 people and ran the biggest Ford dealership in Ireland.

"I ran the business on the soles of my feet," he recalls, "`I put my nose into everything."

But, he realised a point had arrived where as a one-man band the business could never grow significantly. He then made a conscious decision, one of the two best decisions of his life, he says, to pull back from the "front of house side of the business" and become a background person. He set up the businesses as a series of profit centres and delegated each to one person who had to bring in the results.

The second decision ("I didn't come to it overnight") was to retire early from the businesses he ran. He sold most of the businesses to employees in soft deals and is proud of the fact that they are all continuing to trade successfully.

His son Conor continues to run CAB in Cork city, which is still one of the biggest Ford dealerships in the country.

One reason, he believes why family firms have tended to fail in Ireland has been because people appointed family members to succeed them when those people were not necessarily the best persons for the job.

"You can hold onto ownership of the business, " he says, "but you should only appoint a family member to manage the business if they are good enough."

He found his years in business, exciting and challenging. "I might be naive," he says, "but I found people in business to be very honourable."

He says he also found a lot of friendships in business, even among his closest competitors.

Ironically, he found that there was far more rivalry between so-called "professional people" than in the world of business.

He explains: "If you are in business, you are selling products. A professional is selling himself."

He says that business people tend to take the rough with the smooth. "If a professional man loses a customer, he feels wounded for a long time, whereas a business man forgets it in 30 minutes."

During his years in business, Mr Cavanagh's experience straddled many sectors. He is currently a director of Warner Lambert and is also involved in charity work. He is a national trustee of the MS Society and is a patron of the Cheshire Home in Cork.

Given his years as a director of AIB, it is perhaps not surprising that he is a defender of the banks and their high profit levels. He believes the banks do a good job, advocating the argument that Ireland should be proud of a business which spans the globe, has many shareholders and turns in impressive profit performances.

He feels that banks now work much more on meritocracy, that the best person for the job, gets the job. It does not matter who you are related to or whether you went to the right school. Mr Cavanagh also believes banks are a great example of a simple business maxim: that success in all walks of life can often be attributed to one key factor - attention to detail.

"They are doing hundreds of things every day, but they are doing things that bit better than the other guy," he says.

It is here that Mr Cavanagh's gritty realism becomes apparent: "Even in Allied Irish Bank, major decisions are made only rarely and they are not a stroke of genius."

He expounds on his observations, explaining that AIB, and all other companies work out their decisions in a very methodical and logical manner. "They are not a stroke of genius," he says.

Instead, the flair is left to the small-town guy. These people, he says, are the real gamblers, who are up one day and down another. "In a big company, if the answer is not clear cut, then they won't do it - they want the situation to be 85 per cent: 15 per cent.

If there is one "problem" which he sees recurring in business it is that people sometimes get carried away and begin over-trading. He admits he has never seen an economic boom like the current one. He points out that it will not last forever. People should not be formulating business plans on the basis that growth will keep continuing, he says.

"People who are over-stretched or over-borrowed, will be in trouble," he says. But he hastens to add that he is not predicting a major slump.