Liam Carroll: I did it my way?
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You see, that is where it looks un-real on the computer screen compared with the real life situation. But one of the many benefits of working within Zoe was that you got to understand some of both. It is getting harder and harder to do that in the kinds of companies we are creating today, in any industry. People are becoming more and more disconnected from the reality of what they are producing or designing. I grew up on a farm where we reared livestock, but even there you have a complete supply chain outside of that. With supermarkets having access to produce from all over the globe if they choose to change supplier.
I noticed one of the lads at head office moving the steel components around his computer screen, which is a different matter entirely I guess, and a lot safer. There were all kinds of options being played around with, of how to re-use columns and make whatever final, final plan LC would settle upon work. As always, the main directors simply got on with it. They were used to it, and considered it almost a matter of course. One of them said, change is the only constant here. But I know a couple of hardened engineers who were new to the company, and reckoned they had ‘seen it all’ were quite shook when they had to moving those large steel components around their screens, to accomodate some sort of new plan. I think it was to do with putting the ice rink or basket ball court on the roof. That was a last minute brain wave Liam apparently got when he was in Smithfield one evening before xmas 07.
No one really believes that Liam was capable of adjusting or changing the plan at the very last moment, until they work on his projects and it happens to them. Then they tend to believe it. Everyday contracts tend to have a sum they call a contingency sum, in case you burst a utility main or whatever. So that the whole contract will not have to be re-drawn in the middle of construction, it can keep going smoothly. Having the contingency sum in the contract is a good practice I think, but there will always be debate over what amount it should be. Architects will want to keep it as small as possible and free up more of the budget for the things that they like.
In the case of Danninger, we didn’t worry because there wasn’t any formal ‘contract’ between designer, contractor and client. Liam rubbed all of that out, and decided to treat the contract as one very large contingency sum instead. Not one single Zoe project escaped without at least one major change in mid-construction, that involved demolish of some kind. There was no blame thrown about as in normal construction projects, it was simply a normal part of doing business. Liam did make one visit to Tralee hotel, and boy, did the plan really change there. Liam took one step inside what was intended to be the hotel foyer and went, no, this is all wrong, we have to change it all. The hotel was practically complete. Of course, the revised scheme did work better too. But it is kind of hard for people down the line to accept.
There was a scene in Beverley Hill’s cop where Axel Foley drives up to a construction project and tells a group of contractors the plan has changed. That everyone needs to stop working, give yourself a good round of applause and take the rest of the day off. That might help people visualize what I mean. But as I commented elsewhere, the guys who worked with Zoe for a decade or more had factored all of this into how they approach design. They were extremely careful not to pour anything into concrete which could be a future pain in the backside, where changes were concerned. Lateral thinking was always exercised to the full, and it was believed inside the company that nothing was insurmountable. There is always an answer if one is willing to look hard enough to find it. I have never met people in my live so positive as to their ability to solve problems of all kinds. That was the refreshing part about the culture.
It is the polar opposite to the typical architect approach who arrives on site and has a contempt for construction and builders. For instance, the architect who makes a contractor re-tile a bathroom 3 no. times, because the lines of the grouting joints are not perfectly millimeter perfect or something like that. Architects who do not understand real world building tolerances, design difficulties and therefore add enormous expense into their designs. With Zoe, they were sometimes quite clever. They understood the parameters on site of real men working with bits of lazer sights or whatever, trying to plumb something up, and tried as much as possible not to design situations where dead accuracy in X, Y and Z was required.
For instance, in certain bathroom tiling situations, where the architect wants three planes of tilework to meet perfectly at a corner. It is very difficult to do that, as the slightest bit out on any of the planes and you have to start again. Why not avoid that and not design in the problem to begin with. We had an external consultant architect at Tallaght Cross who came up with an idea of a cladding system, that all had to work with pin point accuracy and tolerance over 5-6 floors, and meet at all kinds of corners etc, where everything in all 3 no. X, Y, Z planes had to match perfectly.
Not that the particular architect understood remotely even, the difficulty and extra expense they had designed into the project. He or she still doesn’t know, even though he or she has stood in front of the finished project and taken photographs. I have a few photos myself somewhere of the extra ordinary detail and trouble Danninger had to go to at Tallaght in order to make it work at all. They basically had to ‘loose hang’ the entire facade, before bolting everything firmly into place. It is like when you are screwing back the four bolts of a lid on something. If you don’t loosely screw the bolts initially it never quite fits right.
Try doing that in a situation where scaffolding and the Lord knows what interupts your line of sight. It looks fine in the computer generated visualisation. But the trouble is, and where the costs spiral out of this world, is where the design looking at and approving the computer generated visualisation has never even tiled his own bathroom. Therefore he or she doesn’t understand the difficulty they are designing into the construction (in addition to all kinds of health and safety obstacles to surmount also). One of the architects at Zoe, the best I ever worked with said that to me: Try to tile your own bathroom some time, and then come back and talk to me. This should be a mandatory exercise for all architects going through architecture school. They could be asked to conceive of a design on their computers or drawing board and do the tile work themselves using real materials. I am sorry I never went through the exercise myself.
I guess, money can buy you that kind of perfection. But one shouldn’t have to, that is the point. One shouldn’t have to. Builders for too long, have been attempting courageously to make architect’s designs work. It needs to work the other way for a while. Architects need to think and re-evaluate this carefully today. We could divert away more money into energy conservation and on-site renewable energy generation, if the budget wasn’t consumed by poorly thought out construction and cladding designs. That is how you get to a low carbon city. I mean, if you are having to spend this much bother trying to make the cladding system work at all, then there is no way there will time available during the build for added extras like good insulation and air tightness quality control.
You are fighting a losing battle to make the whole thing work to begin with. Architects need to back away from the edge of what is technologically feasible, in order to leave some slack which can be taken up by eco-friendly construction performance. Until architects know their construction somewhat better, we will not be contributing anything to combat climate change. When you go to architecture school, you are usually told by your professors that anything you design, someone out there can build it. Which is basically true, but it doesn’t say anything about expense to one’s client. Remember, the architect is never spending their own money, but someone elses. In the case of Liam Carroll he made a lot of changes, but it was his own money he was spending. Which is fine for the most part, but he took that away too far at Limerick Parkway.
Brian O’ Hanlon
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2009/0812/1224252421072.html
I actually have the opportunity to tile a bathroom “all the tilers are busy”
And I’m considering it…
The issue I have is the wall tiles weigh a massive 20 kg m sq. existing walls that are not straight and large tiles tricky joints ect… ( I didn’t select the tiles )A side point having a clerk of works doesn’t seem to help with clean construction either…
Builders have enough trouble putting two insulation panels together in a cavity wall and not dropping mortar on top…
architects are also far from perfect…The thing at Zoe, was we always liked brick layers, even when there was trouble with unions. The thing with brick layers, is they show up with their bag of tools on day one of the construction project and start working. By the time you reach the top of the building, your cladding is in place also, or pretty much. That is the great thing about having brickwork, you know how long it is going to take.
You can start sealing up your building, removing scaffolding and moving into the inside of the building. These other ‘clip on’ systems for cladding are fine in principle. But in reality you are extending the period where people are working at heights, moving large heavy objects around. There is no guarantee that the large custom made heavy facade objects will fit, having waited months for them to arrive. The odd one may have to be returned to the maker and re-done.
On one project I know, someone forgot to insert the bolts that held in the concrete cladding panel. Because they changed the bolt hold system for the cladding in the middle of the job. So the bolts were left out in one large concrete panel and work proceeded above that particular panel. No one remember to go back and fix the lower panel correctly and it subsequently fell out when the scaffolding was taken down. Fortunately, no one was standing around. I once heard of a housing project in Clare where the bricklayers left out the wall ties for some reason. The same thing, the panel of brickwork fell to the ground when the scaffoling was removed.
Building sites always have been dangerous places. Everyone involved, including designers need to take this on board. Even if we think we are incredibly clever with our computer visualisation techniques. I liked the way that Zoe developments was able to retain a link, or an intelligent conversation backwards and forwards between designer and builder. The regular building contract sometimes encourages the opposite to happen.
When I told the RIAI president I was doing brickwork drawings for Zoe developments, and he responded, ‘Oh boring stuff like that’, I was disappointed to say the least. Many other consultant architects would ask, what are you doing work for them. Or you have ‘no protection’ there from the builder. Some architects I know even accuse Zoe architects of being lazy and over paid. I don’t know. Architects in Ireland simply have to grow up and understand that a more healthy conversation between construction and architecture needs to be facilitated somewhere. If not in the usual building contract. Too many young professional architects have grown up learning from their elders to despise the contractor and his job.
This is not good practice, for the health, safety and well being of the whole industry as we move forward and aim for higher thermal performance of the built envelope in order to combat climate change. I do like the approach taken though in Construct Ireland magazine, where the architect appears to have a better relationship with their contractor. From the articles I have read, they appear to work together to understand the best sequence of operations to take to achieve higher build quality. That is on small house extensions. But on large capital construction projects, that relationship becomes more difficult with the normal building contract.
http://www.constructireland.ie/
Brian O’ Hanlon
@missarchi wrote:
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2009/0812/1224252421072.html
I actually have the opportunity to tile a bathroom “all the tilers are busy”
And I’m considering it…
The issue I have is the wall tiles weigh a massive 20 kg m sq. existing walls that are not straight and large tiles tricky joints ect… ( I didn’t select the tiles )A side point having a clerk of works doesn’t seem to help with clean construction either…
Builders have enough trouble putting two insulation panels together in a cavity wall and not dropping mortar on top…
architects are also far from perfect…Yeah, I know. Both parties have to work together in order to figure out a proper sequence with which to carry out the work. In your bathroom tile project, you will certainly be short of some tricks and knowledge that a contractor would know about. The wonderful thing about Zoe was that it enabled a conversation to take place. I remember once, we ran a cast iron dry riser pipe up a stair core. It involved drilling of holes through the concrete to run the cast iron pipe up through the multi-storey building. We envisaged in our own architect’s brain this nice cast iron pipe being painted and left exposed in the staircore, with the plastered wall running around the back of the pipe.
But when we went to site, we noticed the plastering contractor had boxed out around this pipe. We enquired why did they go to all of this trouble? Of course, the answer was simple except we didn’t see it. In order to achieve the exposed cast iron pipe effect, the sequence of construction would have to be carefully organised that the plastering contractor went in before the plumbing contractor. Which isn’t the way it normally happens. We felt fairly stupid as two architects standing there and finally understanding why our concept couldn’t have worked, unless we had intervened from the beginning and over-ruled the normal trades sequence. But at least, there was a finishing foreman ‘on our side’ having that conversation, so we could progress in our understanding. In the normal course of effects that conversation is not exposed to the architect. He is removed from it, by several other intermediates. This is what Zoe over came.
Brian O’ Hanlon
Yeah, this is certainly as true as I am sitting here. Liam Carroll’s property portfolio is the juiciest one in the entire country. The fire sale of the century has already happened as far as I am concerned. Adding another one on top of that, will not make one blind bit of difference as far as I am concerned.
Karl Whelan, professor of Economics at UCD wrote the following fine paragraph today.
Of course, it could be argued Carroll’s property empire might be in worse shape than those of other developers. It seems perfectly possible, however, the opposite is the case. His properties mainly consist of Dublin projects likely to get developed in years ahead. Consider, in contrast, the position of those developers who have pinned hopes on developing the proverbial field outside Mullingar.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0813/1224252497177.html?via=mr
This is why the whole Liam Carroll saga defies belief to be honest. Certainly, for those of us still moderately stuck in our own little Celtic Tiger time warp.
Liam had to be some kind of genius to screw it all up. To be honest, we had tenants bending over backways to rent commercial space from us. But Zoe were different, Zoe didn’t cave in to the brief the tenant wanted to give to us. Zoe would make everyone else live according to their own terms. Why did two, not one, but two consecutive anchor tenants walk away from the Limerick Parkway shopping centre project?
Granted, I will submit that supermarket chains are a little bit too big for their own boots, but still.
Now the entire farm is lost, all of that is purely academic.
Brian O’ Hanlon
Liam is in hospital it appears. He is not the only one who has found the last couple of months tough going. What a desperate saga this has all turned out to be.
http://www.rte.ie/news/2009/0814/carrolll.html
I couldn’t help but feel a number of the main people in his company had given up. But instead of admitting it, they were still hanging on for the sake of it. That is what happens when the person at the top gets too tired. That was a big part of the problem. It is a funny thing, how companies can turn sour in such a short space of time. When the leader isn’t quite what he or she used to be.
I know there was enough manure thrown by most everyone in the end. It was indeed, a sorry situation I walked into back in 2006. It really required a new boss to help straighten out a couple of characters. Someone who didn’t owe it to anyone, for years of service etc. Liam simply wasn’t the man he was ten years ago, or he would have done it himself.
I am glad KPMG are finally involved though. That is the best bit of news I have heard in a long time. At least they will ensure an orderly and civilised approach to the disposal of whatever is left.
Brian O’ Hanlon
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2009/0815/breaking81.htm
Robin Williams sketch re Gadaffi:
you cross this line you die
(steps back)
you cross this line you die
(steps back)
you cross this line you die
(steps back)
you cross this line you die
(steps back)
you knock on my door I not coming out
I am delighted to see the guys coming out and getting their photo took. Especially with the guys there from KPMG. That is a wonderful sign in my view. With Liam fronting the organisation there for so long, they never received credit. You wouldn’t believe how much Dave Torpey and John Pope are respected and liked in the Irish construction industry. I know if you are an architect, that is a different matter. You might have many arguments against their business model. But in terms of the construction industry, those two men have everything in the world to be proud of.
John looks like he would rather be in the pup at that hour though.
Brian O’ Hanlon
Written by Emmet Oliver of the Sunday Tribune yesterday.
Risk concentration is one of the most obvious systemic threats that risk officers and, in an ideal world, lending officers, are supposed to guard against. Put simply, no bank should ever have a customer on its books that could imperil the whole institution. Alternatively, the banks together should never allow any customer grow to such a size that he or she has the potential to pull down the entire system.
http://www.tribune.ie/business/article/2009/aug/16/too-much-money-too-few-developers-bank-meltdown/
Brian O’ Hanlon
@garethace wrote:
Written by Emmet Oliver of the Sunday Tribune yesterday.
http://www.tribune.ie/business/article/2009/aug/16/too-much-money-too-few-developers-bank-meltdown/
Brian O’ Hanlon
shoulda, woulda, coulda…
@garethace wrote:
I am delighted to see the guys coming out and getting their photo took. Especially with the guys there from KPMG. That is a wonderful sign in my view.
I doubt they were willing participants as such Brian. Torpey hasn’t been in court much but both of them were hanging around the courts after hearings in order to avoid the photo being taken, this time they were nabbed going in though. That photo looked likei t was taken on the Luas tracks so I suspect they thought they wouldn’t be seen by going in the backway.
–
Comparison with Silicon Graphics.
The thing to remember about Zoe, it is a real ‘engineers versus the world’ kind of story. That is the heroic side to it. That is why money only served as a ‘proof of concept’ rather than anything else. Zoe never knew how to handle money, and had very little desire to learn how. Beyond what was needed in the strict present tense to get by in terms of construction management. It may be helpful to compare the Liam Carroll story to that of another billionaire across the water, Jim Clark, the founder of Netscape. What motivated Jim Clark was a desire to have more money than Larry Ellison. I wonder who the Larry Ellison figure in Liam’s imagination was. Maybe it was Larry Ellison himself. To be honest, I have no idea what kind of ‘role model’ it could be.
Jim Clark started as a very talented though poor engineering student at Stanford in California. He invented a new microchip for processing computer graphics while still at university. Jim decided to set up a company based around his intellectual property known as Silicon Graphics. That company was valued at a billion dollars at its peak. (Due to government provided stimulus into large scale computing projects) No mean achievement for a first company startup.
The problem was, as Jim struggled to keep the company going, he had to look for fresh rounds of finance from the Valley venture capitalists. Eventually, Jim had gone back to the VC’s so many times for additional finance, that Jim ended up working in a company he founded and built, but did not own anymore. He had a few thousand share options he received as company CEO. That was all. Jim Clark next got into something new and adventurous. Jim wanted to start a new company and hold onto more of it, than he had done at Silicon Graphics. Jim noticed a pattern in the Valley whereby, engineers would start up companies and eventually lose them to financiers.
Jim embarked on something to do with TV set top boxes. It was some early concoction of internet commerce, buying stuff using your TV set. Everyone was watching Jim Clark to see what he would do next. Everyone thought, well if Jim Clark thinks that TV set top boxes are the future then why not do that? The set top box idea was meant to be a decoy and it served its purpose. VC money poured in from every angle into TV set top box development and fortunes were wasted in the process. Unknown to everyone in the industry, Jim was a million miles away from that and working with a small group of engineers on his own ‘stealth project’ which would become Netscape.
Jim Clark never managed to hire the top of the class engineers at Netscape. He was contented to work with something less than the best. The best engineers back at Silicon Graphics were reluctant to take a chance on something as risky as a startup company like Netscape. So Jim Clark made do and eventually they shipped a working product. The rest of it and the inital public offering of shares is well known history by now. But Jim Clark always knew he had limited time to exploit the web browser market. At some stage, the behemoth in the personal computer market, at Redmond, Seattle would wake up and smell the coffee.
While Jim Clark was still at Netscape he was holding conversations with his old engineering buddies at Silicon Graphics. Things had gone from bad to worse at his first company and his old buddies were disappointed they had not taken a leap of faith and joined Netscape from the beginning. Jim began to devise a new plan for his third company. The concept was to provide a web of interconnected services between all hospitals in the United States. When Jim’s third company floated on the stock market it achieved a valuation of a billion dollars. Some of the original engineers from Silicon Graphics were on board and delighted to be worth so much money.
I suppose the Jim Clark story is characteristic of the dot.com madness in a lot of ways. But it still contains many aspects which can shine a light on the story of Zoe developments. At a certain stage Zoe became too ‘visible’ in the tiny market that is Irish property. Eventually, Liam Carroll couldn’t sneeze without it alerting half of the construction world on this tiny island of ours. We can criticise a lot of business people who take the money and run away from Ireland to startup abroad in larger markets. But when you look at the Zoe developments story, could you blame them?
My guess is the Dalymount ‘buy an option’ deal is doing a nice job to provide a decoy, for another development not far from Phibsboro. A development which hasn’t been mentioned in any news articles I have seen recently. These are the lengths one is driven to, in order to do any kind of business in Ireland. You have to play a game of ‘hide and seek’ with everyone else. Nothing is what it seems to be. Nothing is transparent and open, or ever will be. One wonders has Ireland paid the ultimate price for too much smoke and mirror playing?
Even though venture capitalists are not the ones who supply finance to the property business in Ireland. There was no shortage of vultures willing to consume what little wealth a group of engineers had managed to gather together within their company. Like the Netscape affair, there was only a limited amount of time that Zoe was ever going to last in the Irish context. Eventually, people were going to wake up, smell the coffee and come in hot pursuit. But Zoe was nonetheless an ambitious and daring undertaking for a group of non-descript engineering types.
Brian O’ Hanlon
Has everyone got their Zoe flags and buntings ready for tomorrow? Did you hear? We are going for another lap around the track in the clapped out banger we still call a company.
As Junk Bond King Mike Milken in the United States once correctly observed, even badly run companies with the worst Feng Shui, Karma and whatever else are incredibly difficult to eliminate.
http://www.mikemilken.com/articles.taf?page=37
Brian O’ Hanlon
I take the point Patrick Coveney makes in today’s Irish Times newspaper.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2009/0820/1224252951982.html
That sound and stable Irish companies such as Greencore who are not drowning in debts at the moment, will end up being direct competitors to NAMA. But what Coveney doesn’t appreciate fully, because it is nice to be sitting in the position he is in today, is how different his reality could be. Especially on a day when Zoe are hoping to win one last desperate gasp for air. At Zoe, we couldn’t wait to get our claws on the ‘Mallow West’ project. Our consultant architects were lining up around the block, in order to work at discount fees, because they knew projects such as this were coming down the tracks. As far as Architects were concerned, receiving a phonecall from Liam Carroll was like talking to God. That is why the experts never dared to question anything.
Coveney if he is amongst the group of clever young and upcoming Irish business people I believe he is, should look at this from a different angle. As an opportunity to study and question the whole paradigm of how Ireland Inc. operated for the past decade or more. Only then will Greencore understand the real wealth underneath its feet. For too long, Ireland has been struggling to find a way out of the ‘reality distortion field’ which was created by Bertie Ahern, Liam Carroll and other prominent Irish figures. What Coveney doesn’t understand is how close he came to being another ‘historical archive’ chapter in a Frank McDonald book. Greencore can justifiably breath a sigh of relief today. They managed to dodge a bullet. But how they make use of this breathing space is up to them.
Brian O’ Hanlon
@garethace wrote:
As far as Architects were concerned, receiving a phonecall from Liam Carroll was like talking to God. That is why the experts never dared to question anything.
I can’t say I see the hand of God in any of Carroll’s developments from an architectural viewpoint. Maybe he never found a capable professional to match his divine vision.
@Rusty Cogs wrote:
I can’t say I see the hand of God in any of Carroll’s developments from an architectural viewpoint. Maybe he never found a capable professional to match his divine vision.
You could be very right on that score Rusty Cogs. Thanks for the comment.
I borrowed the phrase from a biography about Robert Noyce, one of the original founders of Intel Corp. Robert Noyce started out in the microchip business working for a fellow named William Shockley. Shockley shared the Nobel prize with two others from Bell laboratories for having inventing the transistor. Which later became the building block for the semi-conductor industry we see today. When Noyce received a phone call (a job offer) from Shockley, he said it was like picking up the receiver and talking to God.
Later on however, Noyce and his other brilliant colleagues who worked to set up a company for Shockley began to understand him more and realize that Shockley was useless at running a business. Shockley was obsessed with his own ego. It is an interesting story, that of Intel. Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore went through a considerable amount of learning to get to their eventual success. I hope that some of the architects who worked for Liam Carroll can see into a brighter future. One with a lot more promise and prospects.
Brian O’ Hanlon
You know, this side of the story had to come out some time. It might be late, but it is better than never at all.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2009/0820/breaking41.htm
A legal representative of employees of Royceton said they also support the application.
That is good news.
We have to make a firm legal distinction between Liam Carroll and those employees. (In terms of where peoples’ basic rights do stand) It is good that the guys at Royceton will have their day in court. It is the least they deserve for many long years of service. It was their hard work which was behind everything at the Zoe group. Even though in the end, Liam Carroll didn’t appreciate their efforts. Royceton was the central ‘nerve centre’ of operations. It was ‘mission control’ for Zoe developments and required an intense amount of social interaction and cross disciplinary team working. Socializing was never one of Liam Carroll’s strongest attributes.
Towards the end, I was disappointed to listen to professionals who work for Liam Carroll making small of the contribution of Royceton down through the years. I told someone that Royceton had gained a human resources staff and a full functioning health and safety department. That and much more was achieved by David Torpey and John Pope who received a modest annual budget from Liam Carroll. I was told by professionals who had become very close (much too close) to Liam Carroll and his development business, that anything Royceton would attempt could not amount to much. They were lazy and inefficient I was told.
Having worked for Royceton myself, I could never accept that was the case. I received messages not so long ago from individuals working closely with Liam Carroll instructing me to shut my gob. Which only gave me more reason to get to the bottom of this mess. I knew that a ‘false history’ of Royceton was being constructed for a man who could not distinguish between fact and fiction. Liam Carroll was a man, we know was under huge stress. Liam had stopped visiting Royceton, was keeping very private and to himself. For a while I did my best to act as go-between. That never worked out, but I did get a view of the situation from both sides.
I think it was the unique innovations that Royceton brought into construction, and their efforts at forging a relationship with Danninger, the building side of operations and a whole network of sub-contractors, that was the real value of Zoe. Everything else, the ego massaging done with bank credit and adventures on the stock market, was secondary. Everyone wanted to get in on the action and be at the centre of Liam’s enterprise somehow. I even met Seanie Fitzpatrick once in a draughty Danninger portacabin. But it is the achievements of Royceton, in terms of one human being helping out another, that will stay in my memory for a very long time.
Good luck to the guys in Royceton on their day in court.
Brian O’ Hanlon
An old guy I know for a number of years, who is always complaining about everything came out with a sensible point to me, not too long ago. He reckons that Ireland should have been taxing itself more when it had the money during the boom, in order to give itself more relief now that things are against us. In fairness, the Dermot Desmonds of this world aught to be contributing in the right way to the country in which they do their business. But we need our leadership in the country to step up to the mark also.
The Fianna Fail policy during the Celtic Tiger does show us, how wrong you can get government economic policy, even during good times. Ireland’s downturn has been so severe, that it is struggling to come out of it now, the way the rest of the world is. Valuable time and resources that could be used in re-building will not be available to Ireland as a result. Still we are talking about making Bertie Ahern president? It is time we did get some sense.
Elsewhere, Mr Kenny also told the summer school that Ireland failed to prepare for the future during the good years of the economic boom.
I read somewhere in yesterday’s newspaper that Ireland is still in ‘rescue mode’ when it should be planning to go into ‘recovery mode’ instead. The security of oil supply issue is only one example of where Ireland has to get a debate going, on how to cater for the prospect of global energy shocks in the future. I read earlier in the week, that oil trading is climbing again on foot of a possible global recovery. I hope that my summary of Minister Eamon Ryan’s February 2009 report, that I issued to Zoe developments this morning, will find its way into consideration by the courts in the appeal case.
The Zoe interests in Dublin Port lands will be of crucial importance in fast forwarding the solution for oil importation and storage on the island. The Irish government will look to spend up to €300 million on new national oil reserve facilities. A collaboration with Zoe in terms of acquiring the land would be a major benefit. At present Ireland’s oil dependence is only 0.2% of the EU total and much less of the total global dependence. But in proportion, Ireland is a lot more vulnerable to shortages in global oil supply than many other places in the world. For instance, before Christmas 2008, one of Ireland’s leading petrol retailers ran out of supplies altogether!
Brian O’ Hanlon
The old banger completes another lap! Who would have guessed that it had the minerals! Get the fire extinguishers out.
The High Court has granted permission for the hearing of a petition for court protection for seven companies in the Zoe development group while it puts a rescue plan in place.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2009/0821/breaking35.htm
Brian O’ Hanlon
I think that ACC bank have done the Irish nation a profound service in their legal advances thus far. Without them, the Irish people would never have gotten a true picture of the inside track about NAMA and property developers. However, I think there is a bit more to the story that people do not see.
Most of the Irish news commentators had it wrong about Liam Carroll. Carroll wasn’t buying Irish Ferries shares for the land resources. Carroll had done enough building to satisfy anyone for several lifetimes. Carroll was in seek of an easier way to make millions. Something with a lot less trouble and a lot more profit. Something that could generate millions of Euro of rental income per year. Maybe it would involve a ‘public-private partnership’ deal with the Irish government.
Liam Carroll had borrowed an idea from his old friends in the Jurys Doyle family. The same family who managed to fleece the Irish taxpayer for a fortune. This is not like the M50 motorway though. This is the main pipeline for oil supplying Ireland. The rental income from such a deal would make everything else in the Zoe court case look like the peanuts.
The fact is Ireland has no security against global oil supply shock events. The recent Buncefield accident in Great Britain was calculated to be a once in four hundred year event. But it happened and it happened in our lifetime. It took a full year for chemical experts to figure out how to go in and clean up the mess, to deal with the contamination from the explosion and fire. That was a full year during which the Buncefield plant was out of commission.
Imagine that was to happen to the oil supply for Ireland? Now you get some idea of the importance of those Irish Ferry shares that Liam Carroll purchased. Britain was lucky, it had alternative ways to bring oil and petroleum products into the country. Ireland does not. If Dublin port goes out of commission, the country is up the creek without a paddle. There would be no coming back from that economic disaster. Now you can see why Liam Carroll held such a precious ace up his sleeve with those Irish Ferry shares.
Everyone has had their own speculation about the ‘strategy’ of Dutch owned ACC bank, in pursuit so vigorously of Liam Carroll’s €130 million debt. Why worry about such a small sum of money? But my guess is that ACC bank would have bee-lined for the Irish Ferries shares owned by Liam Carroll. ACC bank had figured out a way to convert €130 million into a lot more. Ireland will be sourcing its oil from as far afield as Rotterdam in the future. Rabobank would have no shortage of Dutch companies willing to buy its stake in the Irish shipping gateway.
The Green Party minister Eamon Ryan has published the 180 page experts report last February. To deal with the issue of security of oil supply. Now that minister Ryan has got the report, has he got what it takes to make the deal on behalf of Ireland and buy out Liam Carroll’s shares? I believe David Torpey has had more than enough by this stage. Judging by his body language on the way to court these past couple of days. Myself included, as a past employee of Zoe developments. I have lost all patience with things. We want to get back to doing what we know best. It is as uncomplicated as that.
All attention has focussed in recent months about €90 billion the government is willing to pay for bad bank loans. How about €130 million for the Irish Ferries shares that will give Zoe the money to deal with ACC bank? It is time Zoe got done and dusted with ACC bank. I don’t want my grand children’s grand children having to buy out some bad public-private partnership agreement with some Dutch oil and gas company. Lets try to pass on something useful to those unborn children besides the €90 billion bill we are already loading them with.
Brian O’ Hanlon
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