BACKGROUND:The only way of meeting the man was to accost him on one of his building sites, writes Frank McDonald
LIAM CARROLL will forever be associated with the shoebox apartments built all over Dublin's inner city in the early to mid-1990s by Zoe Developments Ltd, then his flagship company.
It was not until later, when the market became sophisticated, that he hired architects.
A Dundalk-born mechanical engineer who worked for Jacobs International, he had previously relied on a team of architectural technicians to churn out blocks of tiny single or two-bedroom apartments with galley kitchens laid out on long, narrow, artificially-lit corridors.
As told in The Builders*, Carroll "was bitten by the property bug in his early 30s when he bought a site, had a house built by subcontractors and reckoned that there was no great mystery to this property game". Thus he became the main engine of urban renewal in Dublin.
He is described as "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 every evening to the same ordinary, four-bed semi he moved into more than 20 years ago".
A neighbour of Carroll and his wife Róisín, is quoted as saying: "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.
"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."
Commonly described as "abrupt" and "direct", Carroll is known to have an extreme aversion to the media and has never once given an interview, earning him the nickname, "the Property Shycoon"; the only
way of meeting the man was to accost him on one of his building sites.
Every site he developed, usually in run-down areas where property could be acquired cheaply, was assembled by him personally, rather than at arm's length through agents. He would often go back again and again to reluctant vendors until he clinched a deal.
His defence of the shoeboxes which Zoe produced was that he was building flats that people such as nurses, gardaí and teachers could afford.
As for not hiring architects in Zoe's early years, he claimed they were "only interested in designing penthouses for fellows with Mercs".
Nobody knows what Liam Carroll is going to do next, apart from himself and a tight circle of henchmen. Certainly, it was a surprise that he went on to become one of Ireland's leading corporate raiders, building up large stakes in Irish Continental Group and Greencore.
"He showed his mettle in a titanic struggle to wrest control of property company Dunloe Ewart plc from wily solicitor-developer Noel Smyth in 2002," as The Builders notes.
His "dogged, unnervingly silent and ultimately successful onslaught . . . is now the stuff of legend".
With large development sites such as Cherrywood in south Dublin and South Bank Road in Ringsend on his books, Carroll may now be feeling the pinch.
The fact that he sold shares in Aer Lingus last summer at a loss of €20 million was seen by some observers as a straw in the wind.
* The Builders, by Frank McDonald and Kathy Sheridan, is published by Penguin Ireland.
