Paddy Kelly gazes down from the seventh floor penthouse suite of Dublin's Clarion Hotel and counts the number of cranes on the opposite bank of the Liffey, writes Jane O'Sullivan, Markets Correspondent

"Most of them are mine," he smiles, as he counts at least 22.

With four construction projects in the Docklands currently on the go, the softly-spoken midlander is indeed responsible for the busy state of the Dublin 2 skyline and for the high crane-count in other parts of the city as well.

A man with a finger in many pies, Mr Kelly is involved in property developments all over Dublin, from the €450 million development of Smithfield on the city's northside to a €300 million hotel and apartment complex on Burlington Road.

Working in partnership with a long-standing network of family and friends, the list of high-profile projects in which he has been involved in recent years is extensive. In addition to building office blocks in Clonskeagh and hotels in the Docklands, he was involved with Arnotts in the recent purchase of Independent Newspapers' old headquarters on Middle Abbey Street.

Over the years, he has attempted to buy Switzers and held a stake in Bewleys. His hotel management business is involved in the running of Dublin's Morrison Hotel and will operate the converted Carton House near Maynooth, while he is also interested in the Irish operations of Spanish clothing company Mango.

His list of business associates is also a long one. Among the names that continually surface in Mr Kelly's conversation are other well-known names in the property industry such as the McCormacks, Pierses and John Flynn, with whom Mr Kelly has been doing business since 1969.

Like Mr Kelly, whose sons Simon and Christopher are directly involved in the business through a family company called Redquartz, this elite group of developers remains very family-based.

"A big base of our business is friendship and loyalty," Mr Kelly says.

Using this network of friends also provides him with great flexibility. "We can ring friends and go after deals with a phone call," he says.

But perhaps the most interesting part of his business at present is the hotel sector, which he entered in the late-1990s when he backed a buyout of the all-suite Stephen's Hall Hotel on Dublin's Lower Leeson Street.

This prompted Mr Kelly, along with the manager of Stephen's Hall, Mr Jim Murphy, to set up the Prem Group, a hotel management company, in September 1996. While tendering to manage the Morrison Hotel in Cork, it found itself in competition with a UK-based group, Choice Hotels.

Although Prem Group was successful in its bid, it decided to include Choice Hotels in a joint venture. "We are very inclusive in our ways," laughs Mr Kelly.

Thus was born a partnership that is now one of the largest operators of hotels in Ireland with a stable of 21 hotels comprising four-star Clarion Hotels, three-star Quality Hotels and two-star Comfort Inns.

The basic premise behind the operation is to split up the different strands of the hotel business, with management separate to branding, while all of the properties are separately owned by different groups of investors.

Another key element of the model is the decision to give equity in the venture to the management team, giving them a stakeholder's commitment to the business. "As a young person, you have to save your pennies and most have a big mortgage. It's too late before they have access to capital. I like to make sure that capital is available to younger people."

Three new Clarion Hotels - in Cork, Liffey Valley and Sligo - are due to open in the early months of next year, while there are plans to open further hotels in Dublin Airport, Belfast, Galway, Derry and Kilkenny by 2008.

Mr Kelly estimates that the Choice Hotels Ireland business is now backed by properties worth close to €500 million and is on course to deliver pre-tax profits of €14 million on turnover of €56 million this year.

Meanwhile, Prem Group, which is also involved in serviced offices and apartments, is underpinned by property worth €250 million, including €75 million worth of apartments in Britain, and should report pre-tax profits of €5.5 million on turnover of €25 million in 2004.

Earlier this year, Prem Group signed a deal with the world's largest hotel franchise company, Cendant, which allows it to use its four-star Wingate and Days Inn brands in the Irish market.

The company is currently rebranding the Tulfarris Hotel & Golf resort in Blessington - for which it won the management contract last year - as a Wingate property in addition to the other 16 properties it runs in Ireland.

Prem Group is also increasingly active in Britain. Its bid for the 132-strong British hotel chain Premier Lodge earlier this year may have failed but it is busy developing hotels in cities such as Nottingham, Newcastle, Birmingham and Sheffield with a target of 20 locations over the next three years.

But Mr Kelly is also eyeing expansion further afield. He is currently involved in building the village for the Winter Olympics of 2006 in the Italian town of Pragelato.

"Our hope is that this is going to be the first of a number of things we do in Europe," he says.

"One of my ambitions is to see if we can open our business into Europe and the US."

He is already involved in a project across the Atlantic, which came about after a US friend and former banker asked would he be interested in buying an apartment in Florida.

Rather than just buy the apartment, Mr Kelly put together a consortium and assembled a landbank worth $100 million (€76 million).

Backed by Anglo Irish Bank, and in partnership with specialist Florida builder WCI, the consortium plans to build a complex comprising a hotel, 700 apartments and 100,000 sq ft of retail space in Sarasota.

"We will achieve sales of $750 million to $1 billion," he says, adding the consortium hopes to start building in the second half of 2005 or the first quarter of 2006 at the latest.

Back in Europe, he has been scouting for hotel opportunities in Italy and France in a bid to meet his ambitious target of 1,000 Choice Hotels in Europe by 2010. He has also been talking to the authorities in Davos, the Swiss ski town that hosts the annual gathering of the World Economic Forum, about a building project there.

Not bad going for a man who moved into a £1,000 mobile home when he first married, having failed to find a decent flat.

Born in 1944 in Clonmore, near Portlaoise, Mr Kelly remembers growing up amid the scarcity of the war years and the importance of community that engendered. "There was a great sense of co-operation," he says.

After attending the local vocational school in Roscrea, he started building houses locally with his brothers, before moving on to build council houses.

Among the projects Mr Kelly was involved in was Monkstown Valley in Dublin, while he was also responsible for Castlecourt in Booterstown in the 1970s.

Pointing to the way in which money is constantly devalued, Mr Kelly notes: "Those houses sold for £13,000, or around €16,000, in 1972. To buy one today would cost around €850,000."

But working in Ireland in those days was far from easy.

"You'd win and lose. The black economy was all a mess, there was great inconsistency in policy. It was as though our heads weren't working."

So he ventured into the UK where doing business was far easier.

But Mr Kelly's business life hasn't always been plain sailing. In 1977, along with his wife Maureen, he became a Lloyds "name", joining other high-net-worth individuals in a syndicate to use their personal wealth to underwrite insurance risks.

"The thinking behind it was that you could use your assets twice. It had worked for three centuries," he says.

But heavy losses incurred by Lloyds in the late 1980s saw many "names" lose their shirts while costing others dearly. Mr Kelly says now that the biggest mistake he made was to list both himself and his wife as "names", so none of the family's assets could be sheltered in her name.

"Like everything in life you learn from it. We survived it without too much emotional damage," Mr Kelly says.

But the debacle took its financial toll and prompted the Kellys to sell their house on Dublin's upmarket Shrewsbury Road. They did not move far, however. The family retained part of the 1.6 acres on which the house was located and built another.

"It was bad but, like a rubber ball, I came bouncing back," Mr Kelly says. Nowadays, he can look back and laugh, joking that he likes to call the new house "Lloyds Lodge".

"They got the house, we got the lodge," he laughs.

It helps, of course, that these days Mr Kelly is back on track. Although reluctant to put a value on his wealth, his decision to publicly donate €999,999.99 to a South African housing project two years ago showed he was not short of a few bob. There are those that may point out that much of his wealth has been accumulated from the use of tax breaks and incentives but he is at least generous with it.

"I hope to be giving a million away once a year to a good cause," he says. "I wouldn't want to create a family that was selfish and self-centred."

In addition to the provision of social housing alongside his developments in Smithfield, he has been heavily involved in the development and promotion of the National College of Ireland under its President, Prof Joyce O'Connor.

He believes in a life cycle in which people spend "the first 30 years learning, the second 30 executing and the last 30 passing it back. If you can get that cycle going, nothing is lost."

Perhaps informed by the war-time experience of his early years, he is also a strong believer in the collective, in harnessing individual energies for the greater good. Interestingly, in the context of the ongoing Boston versus Berlin debate, he believes that the capitalist/socialist alternatives are too extreme.

"There is room for a collectivism that would embody all our talents," he says. "It is not sufficient just to end up with big corporations with a lot of wealth and no coherent social infrastructure."

Which brings him on to his latest plans, which involve the troubled Irish healthcare sector.

"We would like to put our shoulders to the wheel with Mary Harney," he says of the new Minister for Health, whom he clearly admires.

"Our intention is to do in the health area what we've done with hotels," he adds, noting that there were less than 20,000 hotel rooms when he became involved in the sector in 1996, a figure that is now heading for 60,000.

He talks of the need for purpose-built hospitals, built by private investors and run more efficiently by professional operators.

"You can't run a hospital efficiently out of a Georgian building."

Meanwhile, the 60 year old is certainly not contemplating retirement as he heads off to Monaco on Pragelato-related business before departing for the US a few days later to talk to yet another US hotel company interested in the Tulfarris project.

"I would like to get them involved in a small way," he says. "You move toward partnership in one area and then it could grow."