Analysis: Optimistic haulier hits a bump in the road

The Dublin Docklands, where he lives, has been central to the career of 68-yearold businessman Harry Crosbie.

His father and grandfather grew up in North Wall and it was the yards and property owned by his father’s haulage business that provided the foundation for Crosbie’s spectacular ride on the roller coaster that was the property business during the Celtic Tiger years.

His rise in business started before the boom in the 1990s. In the 1980s he bought the Point Depot warehouse from CIÉ for €952,500 and turned it into a multipurpose concert, exhibition and conference centre. A risky move at the time, the venture proved to be a great success and has since been redeveloped as the 02, in which he has a 50 per cent share.

During the 1980s and early 1990s he bought, developed and sold a range of properties on Ailesbury Road and Shrewsbury Road as well as selling and leasing property on the quays to a range of businesses and individuals. In 1991 he sold four properties on the North Wall to the Custom House Docks Development Authority and two years later he sold a house in Dalkey to The Edge from U2. He also sold houses in Dalkey to racing driver Eddie Irvine and singer/song-writer Van Morrison.

He opened the Vicar Street music venue on Thomas Street in 1998. He teamed up with Treasury Holdings for the massive Spencer Dock development and was also a shareholder in the Convention Centre.
Together with U2, he owned a stake in the Clarence Hotel in Dublin, but sold this in 2006 to Derek Quinlan and Paddy McKillen. And all the time he continued to run the haulage business he had inherited.

A plan to build a skyscraper at the Point at the opposite side of the Liffey to a proposed U2 tower was intended to create a type of portal or gateway to the city from the sea, but never went ahead. When the plan stalled, foundations that had been put in place were filled in. "I have €15 million trapped in the ground," he later told The Irish Times . "I was refused planning permission . . . You get stonewalled, you get refused, you get turned back, but you move on."

His decision to proceed with the €850 million, AIB-backed Point Village development, just as the Irish property bubble was about to burst, was the moment when his ambition and optimism came up against harsh reality.

A 2008 agreement with Dunnes Stores that it would move in as an anchor tenant never went ahead and a High Court judgment earlier this year on the matter said that Crosbie would first have to find other tenants for the development before Dunnes would be obliged to fit out its intended unit. Yesterday’s events cannot have been helpful in that regard, to say the least.

He had a few High Court clashes with former business partners as the bubble burst and the Government established the National Asset Management Agency as a vehicle for taking property development loans out of the banks. A huge tranch of Crosbie loans with AIB moved to the new agency.

It appears that Crosbie managed to come to an arrangement with Nama. The agency seeks a full disclosure from all customers prior to coming to any such arrangements, and then requires the implementation of a business plan which the debtor has to present beforehand for approval. A failure to be fully candid about assets, or lack of progress on the business plan, are the usual reasons for the appointment of receivers. The registry of deeds shows that a mortgage he took out with AIB in 2008 created a charge over various assets including “all property and assets both present and future of Harry Crosbie”.

In 2010 he gave an interview to The Irish Times in the home on Hanover Quay that he shares with his wife, Rita.

“The world I live in has crashed about our ears, the market has collapsed completely and there are a lot of people being hurt out there,” he said. rm and damage this is.”

As of now, the man who made a fortune from the development of the Dublin docks appears to have run out of road.