A reclusive puzzle wrapped in an enigma

The Big Developers:As a billionaire developer who flies Ryanair and writes his own cheques, Liam Carroll is regarded as a maverick, writes Kathy Sheridan

In an industry where stables of thoroughbreds, €18 million choppers and private Girls Aloud gigs are standard kit for even the minnows, Liam Carroll is a maverick. A puzzle wrapped in an enigma. A soft-spoken billionaire in blue jeans, woolly geansaí and ageing Toyota saloon, trucking home to Mount Merrion in south Co Dublin every evening, to the same ordinary, four-bed semi he moved into 20 years ago with his wife Róisín, a former maths teacher, and their family of three.

No sign of glass-covered swimming pools chez Carroll, then? "They might have done a kitchen extension," muses a long-time neighbour. "We'd see him going out in the morning in his jeans and jumper and six-year-old Corolla and for a good while we thought he was a carpenter. Then he turns out to be the biggest developer in Dublin. I think he's been seen in a suit once, at his daughter's school debs."

The glitz of the charity ball circuit and councillor-schmoozing race meetings are not his thing. His life revolves around his wife and children. Outings might involve Sunday lunch in the old Berkeley Court, weekends in Kilkenny, Croke Park for the GAA, a stroll up to Kiely's of Mount Merrion for a pint or a cup of tea. Family holidays used to be in a mobile home in Louth; later they graduated to Italy and Portugal, always with an eye to child compatibility.

The grown-up children in turn, are equally modest, lacking either flashiness or a sense of entitlement. At a personal level, there are some people who describe him as a "decent" man.

This particular developer craves neither publicity nor possessions. At a professional level, no one knows him. To paraphrase the football chant, no one likes him and he doesn't care. "He's our Warren Buffett, but less amiable," says one source. Commonly described as "abrupt" and "direct", his extreme aversion to media of any kind, except - infuriatingly - when he needs it to launch a development, has earned him the nickname "the Property Shycoon" along with a string of less printable epithets, unmediated in his case by the standard-issue public relations consultants.

The absence of the latter was felt sharply in the mid to late 1990s when three workers died on his building sites and his main company, Zoe Developments, was described by Mr Justice Peter Kelly as a "recidivist criminal".

By all accounts, his companies have since become a model for health and safety practices.

His buildings have also begun to show some architectural input, a significant advance on a time when his rampant shoebox apartment developments threatened to blight the entire city. His defence was that he was building property that people such as nurses, gardaí and teachers could afford. "He's just miserable," says a disaffected observer. "He thinks people are always looking for something off him." "I saw him outside the Four Courts recently in his anorak with a bagel and Coke for his lunch. He'd prefer that to going into a cafe," says another.

AMONG THE MANYunverifiable tales about his frugality is one about his trip to London to buy out British Land's stake in the Cherrywood development: the story goes that he turned down the smoked salmon lunch on offer, saying it was a bit rich for him and that he'd already had a Ryanair sandwich, thank you.

Whether any or all of this is down to his legendary thriftiness, solitary nature or general aversion to men in sharp suits and fat cars (principally lawyers and accountants) is moot.

Few know him well enough to be definitive. People who have been in the business for 20 years and are active in the Construction Industry Federation and the Irish Home Builders' Association have never clapped eyes on him.

But those who know him at all agree that his behaviour is not about ego or the sliver of educational insecurity that haunts some of the more flamboyant players in the business.

Dundalk-born Carroll, at 53, is one of the few high-flying property developers of his generation with a third-level education, a graduate of UCD who started out as a mechanical engineer with Jacobs International, bought a site, had a house built by sub-contractors and reckoned that there was no great mystery to this property game.

The hearty dislike for him in some quarters may be attributable to his refusal to play the social game or to explain his actions. "He's a complete loner. He's not into paying big corporate fees, or hanging around the Dáil bar. There is no inner circle. He's not beholden to Irish banks: he'll use international ones if it suits him."

Nor was he ever beholden to agents. In the early years, in his drive to assemble sites, he knocked on doors himself, cut the deals himself, wrote the cheques himself. His administration, like everything else, was and is famously sparse. He still writes all the cheques.

THE DISLIKE MAYalso be rooted in simple jealousy of his genius for sniffing out value, bloodying some of the sharpest noses in the business. "Liam Carroll was way ahead of his time; he built in the inner city when no one else would touch it," says another big developer wryly. "And no one has managed to turn Liam Carroll over. Noel Smyth [solicitor, developer and former chairman of Dunloe Ewart] tried it. He'd won all the battles until he came up against Liam Carroll".

Carroll's two-year, dogged, unnervingly silent, ultimately successful onslaught for control of Dunloe Ewart, is now the stuff of legend. What seemed like a simple revenge attack on Smyth for besting him over a site on Sir John Rogerson's Quay proved to be infinitely more sophisticated. When Dunloe finally fell to Carroll in 2002, the entire company cost him €197 million; but the 400-acre Cherrywood landbank alone, its true extent almost buried in the portfolio, is now reckoned to top €1 billion.

Famously, Carroll's two-year campaign was sustained without a single phone call to Smyth. Part of the lore is that Carroll's first request was the keys to the company's S-Class Mercedes. Greencore's David Dilger is now said to be receiving similar treatment.

At the end of it all, however, the mystery remains. What continues to drive a man like Liam Carroll? With more land than he can possibly develop in his lifetime, he continues to prowl for more. While others start to ponder their legacy, there is little sign that this is true of him. Is there a grand gesture lurking in the great enigma?