Knight errant rides to rescue his bit of Dublin

Developers Mr Richard Barrett and Mr Johnny Ronan, the men behind Treasury Holdings and the massive development proposed for Spencer Dock, are well used to their schemes being challenged - but not by a multimillionaire financier who is much richer than they are.

They were incensed by Mr Dermot Desmond's decision to oppose their plans for the State's largest urban development on the 51-acre dock site owned by CIE. And they knew, or at least suspected, that he would go all the way, taking his case to An Bord Pleanala.

In a sense they are getting a taste of their own medicine: through Keelgrove Ltd, Treasury Holdings came down like a ton of bricks against the developers of two large schemes for O'Connell Street and Parnell Street, both of which are now the subject of High Court proceedings.

Mr Desmond is an unlikely objector. A tax exile with residency in Monaco, like his friend, Mr Michael Smurfit, he is entitled to spend 140 days a year in Ireland. While here he operates from a Master of the Universe suite in the International Financial Services Centre.

Located on the top two floors of the IFSC's south block, its features include expensive cherrywood panelling, Belgian glass walls that can be turned opaque at the flick of a switch, and a small gym with a sensational view westwards over the entire length of the Liffey quays.

Mr Desmond was, of course, the originator of the IFSC concept in 1987 - as he reminded us all on Tuesday when he appeared at the marathon Bord Pleanala oral hearing on the Spencer Dock appeal - and he had no problem selling the idea to Mr Charlie Haughey.

He also availed of this public opportunity to express his longheld belief that the IFSC, though immensely successful financially, has not lived up to its early billing as an "exciting people place", a vibrant new quarter of the city. At night-time or weekends, as he bluntly said, "it is dead".

This prompted Mr Desmond to propose a project to enliven it, involving the installation of a huge aquarium beneath George's Dock with an "ecosphere" in the form of a distorted pyramid rising out of it to a height of 81 metres, right in front of the IFSC office blocks.

Filled with tropical vegetation and equally exotic animals, this extraordinary edifice, designed by an American firm of theme park architects, ran into a high level of scepticism in official quarters. Indeed, it became known to its detractors as the "Gorillas in the Mist" project.

After a lot of hemming and hawing, its promoter maintains he is still waiting for a formal response four years later. Earlier this month, however, it is understood, the Department of Finance finally vetoed it on the advice of the Docklands Development Authority.

It was inevitable that the Spencer Dock developers would dredge up Mr Desmond's ecosphere and throw it at him as evidence that he had no problem with high-rise buildings; after all, had he not put forward plans for a structure that would be significantly taller than Liberty Hall?

While the deeply tanned and smartly dressed financier was being cross-examined by the developers' planning consultant, Mr Tom Phillips, their public relations adviser, Mr Frank Dunlop, unveiled a large colour photo montage of the "Gorillas in the Mist" pyramid in its proposed setting.

It was meant to be a debilitating blow, but Mr Desmond brushed it off. He had obviously anticipated that the Spencer Dock developers would raise his daring plan for George's Dock, so he had his chef de cabinet, Mr Roger Conan, produce a video and show it to everyone at the inquiry.

In this promo a boy wearing a cap, braces and three-quarter-length trousers, like an extra from Angela's Ashes, marvels at the huge green-tinted object rising out of the water, looks mesmerised by fish tanks, and finally walks through a tropical rainforest filled with fauna.

Though Mr Desmond gamely insisted that his project would provide a new symbol of Dublin, on a par with the Tour Eiffel in Paris and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Mr Phillips was not the only one in the audience who was unconvinced; it all seemed so surreal.

The financier maintained that his project for George's Dock would look small, set against the massed ranks of high-rise buildings planned for Spencer Dock. So the Treasury Holdings-led consortium hit back by producing another photomontage, showing them in juxtaposition.

What intrigued Mr Karl Kent, one of the three presiding planning inspectors, was whether Mr Desmond, "as a well-known and successful businessman", believed that Dublin needed to raise its building heights to attract inward investment by companies involved in financial services.

Mr Desmond had no strong views on the matter, though he had "an opinion on what is attractive for the city," derived from his conviction that "we've all got a little bit of ownership of Dublin". His includes the IFSC South Block, a penthouse nearby, and a house in Ailesbury Road.

He certainly did not mince his words on Spencer Dock. To him, it would be a "concrete jungle . . . a bit of Manhattan" - which bit he could not say - transplanted to Dublin. He was aware that it had been designed by Mr Roche, but said the scheme had not enhanced the architect's reputation.

You could almost hear the whoosh of money as he swept out of the hearing at the Gresham Hotel, casting a sideways glance at the developers' table. Sadly, neither Mr Barrett, Mr Ronan nor their partner, Mr Harry Crosbie, the docklands entrepreneur, was present. Was this not a snub?

THE directors of Treasury Holdings did turn up later for a powerpoint presentation by Mr Paul Keogh, Mr Desmond's architectural adviser, who parodied their own advertisements by showing photomontages of the Spencer Dock scheme, captioned, "Can you see yourself living here?"

But they missed the straight-talking economist, Dr Colm McCarthy, who was also acting for Mr Desmond. He said the huge volume of office space - over two million square feet - planned for Spencer Dock amounted to acquiring a 10-year "put option" on the office market in central Dublin.

The case made by Mr Desmond's team was that the anchor of the scheme, the £104 million National Conference Centre, was being used as a Trojan Horse to promote a mammoth American-style business quarter, alien in height, bulk and scale to the general level of development in Dublin.

The calibre of their criticism cheered other third-party objectors, particularly Docklands residents with only a fraction of the financier's resources - though it had probably cost him a lot more than the "insignificant" £75,000 he spent in 1990 on repairs to Mr Haughey's yacht.

But why did Mr Desmond do it? He had not fallen out with Mr Barrett and Mr Ronan, so there was no bad blood between them; indeed, after running into Mr Desmond at Dublin Airport on the way to Cheltenham last year, Mr Ronan had shown him the Spencer Dock plan.

Perhaps the Kaiser, so nicknamed because of his fin de siecle moustache, had his eye on demonstrating to the Dublin business community, which scorned him in the past, that he was still a big player, even if he is no longer physically present in the city for most of the year.

Truly, he transformed David v Goliath into Goliath v Goliath, with David cheering from the stalls.