Paddy Teahon and Laura Magahy go back a long way. Frank McDonald examines their methods and achievements, some of them controversial.
Paddy Teahon and Laura Magahy go back a long way. She was chief executive of the Irish Film Centre when he head-hunted her to join Temple Bar Properties as its culture and finance director in 1991. Like other top jobs in TBP, the post was never publicly advertised.
Mr Teahon was the company's first managing director, serving on a part-time basis while continuing as assistant secretary of the Taoiseach's Department.
When he had to step down in May 1992 to take charge of negotiations on a new "social partnership" deal, he invited her to take over.
And so, at the age of 31, Laura Magahy became the first woman to head a State-sponsored company. In turn, she brought in Patricia Quinn - currently director of the Arts Council - as TBP's cultural director. They were a formidable duo, branded by some critics as "the linen and lipstick sisters".
Responding to claims that they played their cards so close to the chest that nobody else in the area knew what was going on, not even their cultural clients, Ms Quinn said in July, 1993: "That's the dark side of our good qualities. We give the necessary information to the right people at the right time."
Though others might have queried what they were doing, she and Ms Magahy were "driven by a vision - we know what we want and we are going to get it". A constant refrain during the course of a lengthy interview with Paddy Woodworth in The Irish Times was: "We make no apologies."
This was in the aftermath of TBP's controversial demolition of five early-18th-century buildings on Essex Quay in May 1993, which incurred the wrath of An Taisce. Ms Magahy defended what was done on the basis that the buildings were "dangerous" - a claim not borne out by an engineering report.
In fact, TBP had been informed that, in spite of their poor condition, the five buildings were about to be listed for protection by Dublin Corporation. Since it was preparing plans to replace them with new apartments, this would present a problem. In the event, the buildings were demolished.
In the same month, Paddy Teahon succeeded Padraig Ó hUiginn as secretary of the Taoiseach's Department. "Nobody becomes secretary of a government department unless they're good. And nobody becomes secretary of the Taoiseach's Department unless they're damn good," one source said at the time.
Quoted in a profile of Mr Teahon in the Sunday Business Post, this source - described as a Civil Service acquaintance - accurately observed one of his enduring qualities: "He's not your typical mandarin. He will cut the odd corner and break through red tape if it will achieve the desired effect."
The Kerry-born Mr Teahon personally negotiated the purchase from Bank of Ireland of the former Central Bank building in Foster Place and some property to the rear, clinching the deal for £1.3 million in 1992.
Along with Ms Magahy - but not TBP's property director, Owen Hickey - he negotiated a deal with the highly-sceptical Department of Finance that required TBP to make a strictly commercial return on its non-cultural developments, both residential and retail. As a result, student housing had to be ditched.
Earlier, under the influence of Ms Magahy, he had considered giving the commission to draw up the Temple Bar Architectural Framework Plan to Group 91, a consortium of Dublin architects including O'Donnell and Tuomey, who had designed the Irish Film Centre - without holding any public competition.
It was only after Mr Teahon was told that handing out such a prized commission in this fashion would cause consternation among the architectural profession that TBP decided to hold such a competition. It was won by Group 91, whose members had been working on the project in advance.
In the construction programme that followed to create Dublin's "cultural quarter", neither Mr Teahon nor Ms Magahy was particularly interested in the nitty-gritty detail of building contracts or project management; that was largely left to Owen Hickey and his mostly-male team on the property side.
"Paddy Teahon is typical of that new breed in the upper echelons of the Civil Service who think that good generalists such as themselves are better than any professional," one former colleague observed. "They think if they can run the country, they can run anything. And that's the key to his personality."
Mr Teahon took risks in Temple Bar. "His attitude was 'let's do it and we'll sort out the details later'," this source said. That approach could explain why the "dormancy issue" involving Waterworld UK was not communicated to the Government when its bid for the aquatic centre at Abbotstown was accepted.
Within a matter of days, in December 2000, a planning application for the project had to be lodged with Fingal County Council if there was to be any chance of meeting the deadline to host the Special Olympics in June, 2003.
The last thing Campus Stadium Ireland Limited (CSID) or the winning consortium needed was to have it delayed over a technicality.
When Mr Teahon was appointed as executive chairman of CSID in March, 2000, some saw it as inevitable that Laura Magahy would become involved in the Abbotstown project in some way as the two had become such close confidantes over the years.
Before stepping down as managing director of Temple Bar Properties, Ms Magahy had already secured a contract to serve as project manager for the relocation of Temple Street Children's Hospital to the Mater site in Eccles Street. Thus, she would not have been able to take up a full-time chief executive's post.
What opened the way for her to join the Abbotstown team was CSID's decision to advertise instead for a consultant "director of executive services", heading a multi-disciplinary team that would include engineers, quantity surveyors, public-relations agents, accountants and planners with expertise relevant to the project.
Magahy and Company are now being paid €127,000 per month - and it is a matter for her, rather than CSID, to apportion this sum among the executive services team. It has negotiated a similar deal for the Digital Media Village project in the Liberties area of Dublin, where Paddy Teahon is also executive chairman.
Sports Campus Ireland suffered a major setback last February when the Office of Public Works resigned as project manager because it was no longer prepared to report to Magahy and Company.
An even bigger reverse was the Government's decision in April to commission an "independent overview" of the entire project.
After a draft of High Point Rendel's report was submitted to the Minister for Sport, Dr Jim McDaid, in late-September, CSID sought to have it rewritten - specifically, the section that suggested that the team in place at Abbotstown, with no experience of major international projects, was not up to the job of delivering it.