Developer Sean Dunne retains ambitions to be a major player in the Irish retail scene, discovers Hugh Oram
Few, if any, developers have managed to attract quite so much media coverage as Sean Dunne or have been involved in so much litigation.
Born in very humble circumstances in Co Carlow, 54-year-old Dunne started out in life without a penny, by his own admission, such was the poverty of his family. One recent estimate of his personal wealth, nine months ago, was just over €100m, but that was before the meltdown in share and property values.
Many people believe that Dunne came from an extremely humble background where money was an unknown quantity. That’s not quite true. He was born in Tullow, Co Carlow, in 1955. His father had a modest clerical job with the local county council and he also worked as a part-time officer with the local fire brigade, so the family was getting by pretty well on a modest income. However the story is that Sean Dunne used to swim in the River Slaney when he needed a bath and that he was busy making hay and picking potatoes before he was even a teenager.
Sean Dunne was keen to improve himself by studying and he applied himself assiduously, firstly at the local vocational school, then at institutes of technology in Carlow and Waterford. He went on to qualify at the Dublin Institute of Technology as a quantity surveyor. Dunne went on to get a second degree in surveying, from Trinity College, Dublin.
He then emigrated to Canada, where he worked for an oil extraction company, before he returned to Ireland in 1979 to set up his own construction business, DCD Builders. His first job was constructing 20 social housing units at Sallynoggin
in south Co Dublin. But the Irish economy fell into recession, much like today, and in 1985, Dunne headed to London, for four years. There, he married his first wife Jenny Coyle, an Aer Lingus hostess, with whom he had three children.
Returning home, he set up what is the now considerable Mountbrook Group which became, over a quarter of a century, one of Ireland’s leading property development companies. Dunne has become one of Ireland’s most formidable developers and renowned in a tough business for being one of the toughest of them all.
After years of building good quality housing developments, Sean Dunne started branching out into retail development. His first large scale retail development was the Whitewater Shopping Centre in Newbridge, Co Kildare, which opened in April, 2006. The Mountbrook group purchased the site, formerly owned by Irish Ropes, in the centre of Newbridge, together with Sean Mulryan’s Ballymore Properties.
Whitewater was designed to be one of the most exciting and innovative shopping destinations in Ireland and so it has proved, despite its proximity to Dublin. It has 32,000 sq m of retail, including three anchors and around 50 other retailers. Facilities include about 1,500 car parking spaces.
Today, Whitewater is 95 per cent let and Savills recently agreed a deal for the one remaining big unit there, although details have yet to be disclosed. According to Declan Bagnall, associate director, at Savills in Dublin, Whitewater has turned out to be a “pretty good” development, with last year’s footfall up on that for 2007. In the four years since it opened, Whitewater has represented a solid success for Dunne and Mulryan, as well as providing a useful facility for the local population.
Subsequent retail deals haven’t proved as easy. One of Mountbrook’s more recent plans was for the Kilcock shopping centre in north Co Kildare, to be built on the site of the former Zed candy factory. Dunne’s plans had called for close on 200 residential units, as well as just over 5,000 sq m of retail, but the plan ran into planning difficulties.
The local authority granted planning permission and the An Bord Pleanala inspector on the case also recommended granting permission. Then the board requested three amendments to the plan, which were complied with, after which according to Mountbrook, the board bizarrely refused the application.
So too has the far more grandiose plan for Charlesland in Greystones, Co Wicklow. Sean Dunne and Sean Mulryan plan another joint venture here, to include around 20,000 sq m of retail in a new shopping centre. The whole project is costed at €1bn. However, planning permission was refused recently and by the time it goes through the appeals stage, it could be quite some time before construction actually starts.
Then there is the small question of the downturn in the Irish economy, including retail sales sliding at the fastest rate in Europe. In the current crisis, it’s a moot point whether Charlesland can attract either the funding the developers need or the high class retailers they need to sign up for the centre.
In the meantime, a big question mark hangs over Dunne’s plans for the site he acquired in Ballsbridge, Dublin, four years ago. He paid €370m for the adjoining sites occupied by the then Berkeley Court, Towers and Jurys hotels. Sources in the property business indicate that Sean Dunne may have put up about €100m of the money himself and to have borrowed the rest. Much of that money came from the Ulster Bank, part of the Royal Bank of Scotland.
His plans for the site are certainly grandiose, including a 37-storey tower, an underground shopping centre, 20,000 sq m of office space, much residential and plenty of luxury retail to fit alongside. Until recently, if he had got permission to build the tower, Dunne would have made a huge profit on the deal, but times have changed dramatically.
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"Whitewater was designed to be one of hte most exciting and innovative shopping destinations in Ireland and so it has proved despite its proximity to Dublin" |
An Bord Pleanala has now turned down the entire project, but Dunne refuses to give up: he has announced that he is going to submit revised plans and says he is determined to see the project to completion in some form or other.
But if he eventually does get permission, funding for the project is likely to be problematic and so too will the question of whether people will sign up for the residential and commercial options, given the current dire economic climate. Some sources say that Sean Dunne already faced D-Day with this particular project when the property market collapsed. He has also faced vehement local opposition to the project but that is probably the least of his worries right now.
In the meantime, he has kept the two main hotels on the whole site going under different names, but as a sign of the times, the room rate in one of those hotels was slashed to just over €20 a night in a recent promotion.
The entire project and Sean Dunne’s involvement in it has become enormously controversial and has generated a mountain of media coverage. He was even the subject of a big profile recently in the International Herald Tribune, the Paris-based offshoot of the New York Times.
Even this generated huge controversy, as the article suggested that he could be insolvent, a suggestion that he later fervently denied. But he did admit that it would be difficult to find the €600m needed to finance the Ballsbridge project. “It is fair to say that there is not a queue of bankers lining up to lend to me right now,” he was quoted as saying.
But he has to adjust to radically changed times. Recently, staff numbers were cut back at his group and some of his senior executives agreed to take 50 per cent pay cuts. Sean Dunne himself admits that he isn’t too proud to still bend down to pick up a coin on the floor, a throwback to his modest childhood.
Even though he may appear benign, with what the International Herald Tribune called a “ mischievous grin”, and is a very gregarious and sociable person, he has a notorious reputation for taking legal action against anyone who crosses him, whether it’s a local newspaper or rival property
developers. Just recently, CBRE started a legal action against him over some €1.5m in fees it claimed hadn’t been paid. In an affidavit, CBRE said that the agreement involved in the case was made with Sean Dunne himself, while his counsel says that the alleged liability is not his, but of one of the companies in his group, Mountbrook Homes.
The case is set for hearing in the Commercial Court in Dublin on February 18. It’s just one of litany of well publicised legal cases that he has been involved in in recent years.
Apart from all his development plans and his litigation, Sean Dunne also enjoys a high profile social life. In 2004, he married for the second time; his second wife is Gayle Killilea, who used to be a gossip columnist with the Sunday Independent newspaper in Dublin. She is 20 years his junior. For the nuptials, Sean Dunne invited 44 of his friends to join him on a two week Mediterranean cruise abroad the yacht Christina O. He is nothing if not gregarious and former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern is among his close friends.
Sean Dunne and his wife live in some splendour and opulence in Dublin’s most exclusive residential street, Shrewsbury Road.
At the moment though, his problems centre around finding enough funding and enough people to sign up with for his Ballsbridge scheme, as well as seeing the Greystones project through the planning appeals process, then finding the funding to start building.
A telling sign of how his fortunes have changed, along with those of the Irish economy, comes from one of Dublin’s most renowned churches. The church of St Stephen’s, belonging to the Church of Ireland, and known as the “Pepper Canister” church, isn’t far from Dunne’s Ballsbridge site. He modelled much of the design for the site on the dome of St Stephen’s.
In an appropriate metaphor, that dome is in danger of collapsing and €100,000 of funding is needed from the public for the necessary repairs. The honorary treasurer of the church, Dr John McCroddon, says that they had been hoping that some of that cash would come from Sean Dunne. He added: “Now may not be the best time to go after him,” Retail property developers are a pretty hard boiled lot, none more so than Sean Dunne, the toughest of them all, so no-one is making the mistake of writing off any of his current or likely future plans.
