Quinn turns any material into gold

There may be brass where there's muck, but Sean Quinn has proved there is a fortune in the stony soil of his native Fermanagh.

The Sean Quinn Group, whose core business is concrete and cement, has been granted planning permission by Cavan County Council to build a £55 million cement factory in Ballyconnell which will employ 250 people.

Quinn is continuing his penchant for turning the natural materials underfoot into gold - the glass factory being built a half mile from the old family home in Derrylin, Co Fermanagh, will use sand from his quarries when it goes into production next summer.

People have given up telling him he will fail as he builds his diverse empire block by block. Next year he will apply for a licence to develop the life assurance market from his two-year-old Quinn Direct insurance business which, he says, had a £19 million turnover this year, an increase of £7 million on its first year.

The company has 30,000 policy holders, amounting to 2 per cent of the market.

"The business is going very well. It is about 70 per cent private motor insurance.

"Being direct would be an influence because it saves us a lot of overheads and brokers' fees. We feel we can develop into a major industry over the next five years," he says.

Quinn Direct is also heavily involved in commercial vehicle, commercial fleet and pure commercial insurance, drawing on its own experience - the group has a fleet of 130 vehicles.

The life assurance will also be cost competitive, avoiding brokers' commissions by running on a direct basis from the telecentre in Cavan town with a showcase office in O'Connell Street, Dublin.

Depending on how quickly the application is processed by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Quinn life assurance is planned to start as early as 1999.

The group also has factories making concrete, aerated blocks and roof tiles and it owns 12 pubs - all in Dublin except for one in Berlin - and seven hotels, including the Slieve Russell in Co Cavan.

While in the early days Quinn's properties were financed with funding from the other businesses, they are now in turn "generating surplus cash", he says.

It put him in the position to buy the Iveagh Baths in the Liberties, Dublin, from the receiver earlier this year after the orginal developers were unable to meet the refurbishment cost.

The listed building was refurbished at a cost of more than £2 million and converted to a fitness centre.

Planning permission to begin his latest project, a cement factory with an annual one million tonne capacity on an 86-acre site at Ballyconnell, was granted on November 20th. It will take over the capacity of the plant at the group's headquarters a few miles across the Border at Derrylin, which no longer meets environmental standards but which will retain its cement bagging facility.

He says a major factor in choosing Cavan was the Republic's current 10 per cent Corporation tax rate, comparing favourably with the North's 31 per cent rate.

As a young man Sean Quinn - now 51 - turned his back on farming at the 23-acre family homestead. He once said that he was the worst farmer in Europe.

He also disliked school and left formal education at 14. He began working as an agricultural contractor, rotavating soil for local farmers.

In 1973, the same year he met his wife, Patricia - also a Quinn, from Galway - he turned to the gravel business. He borrowed £100, sank a well, extracted the gravel, washed it on site and sold it to local builders.

Next he turned to concrete, then cement - at one stage running up a £25 million debt to finance the factory - and now glass.

His interests include poker, fitting well with his passion for measured risk-taking, and the GAA. He is a former captain of the Fermanagh team and built his early business contacts around the football network.

He has said that success excites him and his £58 million glass production project will be the first of its kind in the North. It received a grant of £12.5 million from the North's Industrial Development Board. It will be vying with the Ardagh-owned Irish Glass Bottle Co in Dublin for business north and south, along with British producers.

The Sheffield-based British Glass Confederation has consistently opposed the project, claiming that jobs will be displaced in an industry already suffering from over-capacity.

"They hired a group of consultants from Belfast and went through it inch by inch for more than a year and tried to find a way of stopping the project," he says.

But Mr Quinn says that a "rigorous" application was submitted, which was examined by the IDB for nine months before the approval was given for the grant.

He says the industry is uncompetitive, pointing to the imports coming into Britain from Germany and Holland. "We are going to have the most modern factory in Britain and Ireland.

"I think we can produce the cheapest glass, and we will try to get the best price for it," he says.

He adds that the group will remain as a private company for the moment, although a flotation has been regularly considered.

"We are very open minded and discuss it fairly regularly. I have learnt over the years that you never say never."