Liam Carroll
Born: September 1st, 1950
Died: March 2nd, 2021
Liam Carroll, who has died aged 70, was one of the most consequential developers in Celtic Tiger Ireland. With his company Zoe Developments, he scaled dizzying heights of success before, like several of his professional contemporaries, losing it all in the property crash of 2008 and 2009.
Unlike many of them, however, at the height of his success Carroll was determinedly frugal, eschewing publicity and the material trappings of success and wealth, including trophy mansions, fast cars and helicopters.
Like many entrepreneurs, Carroll was very much his own man, preferring to do things himself, and for many years resisted using the professional services of others. These included architects, designers and sales agents
Over some 25 years, Zoe built almost 9,000 residential units in Dublin, most of them apartments and many in inner city areas hitherto starved of development. Typically, the apartments were small and comparatively inexpensive, making them attractive to first-time buyers, often single people otherwise priced out of the market.
While Carroll’s impact on the built environment of Dublin city is beyond dispute, he was not without his critics, including, famously, Mr Justice Peter Kelly. Following the death of a building worker and multiple health and safety breaches, in 1997 the judge described him in the High Court as “a disgrace to the construction industry” and declared that Zoe was “not entitled to make profits on the blood and lives of its workers”.
But in the aftermath of the developer’s death many who worked with him remembered a man without airs, who was interested in people and in solutions to problems – especially those offered by his employees, at whatever level for him they worked.
Many of the almost 300 messages of condolence posted online after his death complimented him as a visionary developer, a trustworthy business partner and a good man to work for.
William Carroll, as he was christened, was born in September 1950 and grew up in Dundalk, Co Louth, where his father, Lowry, was a bookie with premises in the town and a pitch at the local greyhound race track.
After secondary school, the young Carroll went to UCD where he studied electrical engineering and made several life-long friends.
Among them were three companions with whom, in the summer of 1971, he embarked on a rite-of-passage road trip in the United States. With Carroll behind the wheel of a Ford Torino GT (he was the only one with a driving licence), the quartet explored the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, as well as Washington DC, Maryland and Pennsylvania.
After graduation, Carroll went to work for Jacobs Engineering, an international firm specialising in large-scale infrastructure projects. There, he worked on what was known internally as The Arab Potash Project – a Jordanian scheme to extract water from the Dead Sea and convert it into fertiliser.
Anxious to strike out on his own in the early 1980s, Carroll began to dabble in small-scale property development. His first was a site on Sandford Avenue in Ranelagh where he built three townhouses, followed by a similar project of two townhouses on the Rathgar Road.
Like many entrepreneurs, Carroll was very much his own man, preferring to do things himself, and for many years resisted using the professional services of others. These included architects, designers and sales agents.
“Throughout the mean ‘80s,” said a long time associate and friend, “Liam looked after the building projects and was also literally selling them himself. Through those years, every penny that he made went back into the business.”
On one project in the early 1980s, he bought a second-hand white Toyota Carina (he scolded a colleague who once treated himself to a new Mercedes) to which he attached a ball hitch so he himself could buy, tow and deliver small loads of building materials to a site.
“He’d be saving the delivery charges,” a former colleague recalled.
Friends and those who worked closely with him throughout his career insist he wasn’t mean or parsimonious, only that he was very careful with money – a characteristic that also attended his personal life.
“Trappings and stuff didn’t interest him,” says a former business associate. “He didn’t need them to say to himself that he was successful.”
Thus even when a multi-millionaire, he lived in a relatively ordinary suburban house in Mount Merrion, dressed down, often preferring slacks, pullovers and an anorak to sharp suits, and drove a second-hand car.
“He was a loner. He did his own thing,” said a friend from student days.
Behind the scenes, however, there was nothing ordinary about the business Carroll was building.
Specialising in buying sites in areas of the city not favoured by other developers, typically in Dublin 1, 7 and 8, by the early 1990s Zoe was building hundreds of small apartments annually, and, in a change of tack, was selling them through estate agents Hooke & MacDonald.
“He built in areas where others feared to tread,” says a friend from those years. “He was revitalising the inner city before others even thought about it. Liam provided accommodation people could afford and who sold later at a profit and this gave them a stepping stone for getting on the housing ladder.”
Critics slammed the apartments as contemporary tenements, disparaging them as “shoeboxes” but others cheered.
“They were compact homes for people to live in,” says one of Carroll’s former colleagues. “Many were bought by single women who had been living in bedsits.
“We turned Smithfield, North King Street, Brunswick Street into neighbourhoods and enabled people to get their first toehold on the property ladder and today, look at Smithfield and Stoneybatter – full of people who began in a Zoe apartment.”
Gradually, as regulations demanded, and consumer tastes developed, the company moved up market – in terms of size and location of the apartments it built. As an example, Zoe played a major role in creating modern day Grand Canal Dock.
The company built the landmark Millennium Tower and Charlotte Quay apartment complex. It built the Gasworks apartments and office complex on Barrow Street, some 18,580sq m (200,000sq ft) currently occupied by Google and the result of no fewer than 21 planning applications to Dublin Corporation.
As sites became more scarce and competition to buy them more intense, Carroll hit on the notion of acquiring whole companies that had land banks. Thus he targeted and took over Dunloe Ewart which owned Cherrywood, earmarked to be, in effect, a new small town in south county Dublin.
At the time (2002), the proposed Luas Green Line extension was set to end at Cherrywood but Carroll convinced the Railway Procurement Agency to extend it to Bride’s Glen and also got the adjacent M50 junction upgraded to cope with the expected increase in vehicular traffic. What is now fast emerging there today was first envisaged by Carroll.
'He liked talking to the people who did the work. He wanted to learn from them.'
By the time of the property crash, Zoe was the largest landlord in Dublin and Carroll’s personal wealth was estimated to be over €1 billion.
From 2007, when the sub-prime property bubble began bursting in the United States to the autumn of 2009, Carroll and Zoe executives fought to save the company – initially by seeking agreement with trade creditors and then through unsuccessful efforts to obtain protection through examinership.
In the end, with its liquidity exhausted, the company foundered with debts to Irish and international banks of some €1.3 billion. For Carroll personally, it was an ignominious and humiliating public end for a quintessentially private man.
“It had a devastating impact on him mentally,” recalls a friend who was with him through great days as well as the dark ones. “He found it very, very difficult to deal with.”
Never a man for the spotlight, Carroll all but vanished from view, spending his declining years dogged by ill-health, with his wife Róisín and children Nuala, Bróna and Conor, to whom he was devoted.
Family holidays, sometimes in France or Portugal, were low-key affairs – even at the height of his wealth, five-star hotels were avoided in preference to mobile homes or cottages. He enjoyed watching sport (GAA, League of Ireland soccer and Liverpool FC) and the occasional pint.
Proud of his legacy in construction, for Carroll the kick he got from business was not the wealth it brought nor the self-praise of looking at something and saying “I built that”.
“What he enjoyed most was getting the deal done and then implementing,” says an associate and friend.
“Liam had an awful lot of time for people. He’d listen to them and engaged with them.
“When he came to a construction site, he’d prefer talking with the foreman than with the manager in the site office. ‘Have you got everything you need?’ he’d ask his workers. ‘Is there a better way of doing what we’re doing?’
“He liked talking to the people who did the work. He wanted to learn from them.”
Carroll’s absolute determination to preserve his privacy, and the privacy also of the Zoe Group of companies, of which there were 127, meant the extent of his wealth – and ultimate financial loss – was never fully known. But in the end, almost all of it was gone.
“He did not die a wealthy man,” says a friend.
Carroll’s funeral was strictly private, the date unannounced. Predeceased by his father Lowry and mother Christina, and by his sister Geraldine, he is survived by his wife and children, and by his brothers Colman and Lance.