It's difficult to understand what property developer Pat Doherty is doing buying up more shares in McInerney.

It's hard to believe that Mr Doherty wants to get a public quotation for his own Harcourt Developments company, given the current antipathy in the market for property companies. By the same token, if Mr Doherty believes that McInerney is undervalued and worth a punt, why didn't he buy more shares earlier in the year when McInerney was trading at two-thirds its current level of between €2.70 and €2.80.

Mr Doherty featured prominently in the Johnston Mooney/Telecom affair in the early 1990s when he bought the Johnston Mooney site in Ballsbridge from United Property Holdings for £5.8 million (€74 million) and then sold the site on Telecom for its planned new headquarters for £9.4 million.

Despite that brief moment of fame, he is best known these days for his highly successful industrial and retail developments around the State.

The £2 million-odd he spent to buy almost four million McInerney shares last week to become the biggest shareholder is small change for Mr Doherty, but property sources believe he must have some motivation for his investment apart from believing that McInerney is a good punt for his Harcourt Developments company.

Leaving aside his supermarket interests around the State, it is for industrial projects such as the £200 million Parkwest development west of Dublin, which has become home to a host of fibre-optic and telecom companies, that Pat Doherty is best known.

McInerney's Hillview commercial development arm is less high-profile, but it is responsible for some extensive industrial developments in the Dublin area, has an option on 600,000 square feet of industrial space in west Dublin and also has a 75,000 square feet site at Little Island in Cork.

All those sites and space are potentially hugely lucrative if the economic boom and the demand for industrial space continues.

But anything Harcourt wants to do with McInerney will have to be a friendly move, given the 12 per cent-plus held by McInerney family interests and directors. Another 50 per cent of the shares are held by institutional investors.

Mr Doherty's Harcourt Developments board has an interesting make-up. Included as directors are Phil Flynn, vice-president of Sinn Fein in the early 1980s, past-president of ICTU, and chairman of ICC Bank and industrial dispute trouble-shooter.

Sitting alongside Mr Doherty and Mr Flynn on the Harcourt board is Mike Murphy, whose showbiz talents extend all the way from the Arts Show to Winning Streak.