Developer Owen O'Callaghan has left a legacy across the Irish skyline
Tributes have been paid to property developer Owen O’Callaghan for his commitment to and vision for his native city over almost half a century.
Mr O’Callaghan, 76, whose Cork-based firm built thousands of homes, several landmark office complexes, and retail shopping centres, died early yesterday after a short illness.
Lord Mayor Des Cahill led tributes at last night’s city council meeting, saying the city was lucky to have had someone of Mr O’Callaghan’s calibre so committed to the development of his native city.
“The city has lost one of its champions,” Independent councillor Kieran McCarthy said, while Fianna Fáil councillor Terry Shannon praised the developer’s impact on the fortunes of the Mahon area following the development of Mahon Point shopping centre.
Lawrence Owens, CEO of Cork Business Association, said Mr O’Callaghan had a deep passion for all things Cork, while Cork Chamber president Barry O’Connell said his various projects had resulted in the creation of thousands of jobs.
Mr O’Callaghan is survived by his wife Shelagh, and their children, Brian and Zelda. Their daughter, Hazel, died in a tragic accident in 2002.
His remains will lie in repose at the Temple Hill Funeral Home on Boreenmanna Rd, with removal at 6.30pm today to St Patrick’s Church in Rochestown.
Requiem Mass will be celebrated at 1pm tomorrow, with burial afterwards in St Mary and St John Churchyard Cemetery, Ballincollig.
Up to 10,000 people work in buildings, shopping centres, or offices delivered by builder and developer Owen O’Callaghan, while another 6,000 families live in houses or apartments he made possible. He passed away early yesterday after an illness and complications from pneumonia which arose at Christmas.
Aged 76, Mr O’Callaghan had continued to work, strategise and develop, marking a career and empire that spanned 48 years. His work was always rooted in his native Cork to which he was hugely loyal and committed, but which included investments and projects in the UK, and retail schemes across Ireland.
He developed the €500m Mahon Point Shopping Centre and Retail Park in Cork’s suburbs in 2005, having bought the 111-acre site from the city council in the late 1990s. A decade later, he fulfilled a promise to return to Cork city centre to deliver the high-end, global-fashion-shop-dominated Opera Lane and the Half Moon St developments (now occupied by Apple) in the heart of the city.
In typical strategic fashion, he used the landbank at Mahon to relocate city occupiers to provide him with new development sites, such as at Anderson’s Quay (rehousing the CSPCA at Mahon) at Emmet Place (Johnson and Perrott) and Academy St, where the Irish Examiner was based, with this newspaper’s printing presses moving out by the Lee tunnel after 150 years of operating just off St Patrick’s Street.
Now fully occupied, Opera Lane and its rejuvenating effect on the city’s heart is arguably O’Callaghan’s proudest achievement in his native city, and those who worked with him wryly observe “he only developed outside of Cork when there wasn’t enough to do here, this is where his passion was”.
Opera Lane, valued at up to €500m when initiated, was developed in the teeth of recession after a boom-time and enormously costly and strategic site assembly, possibly up to €100m. A high quality project, Opera Lane’s success as a counter-cyclical project recalls his delivery of the Merchants Quay Shopping Centre with Dunnes Stores, neighbouring Roches Stores, in the recessionary times of the 1980s.
Although controversial for its blanket quays destruction and site clearing, as well as its questionable architectural quality, Merchants Quay saw O’Callaghan begin to forge a hugely successful track record in attracting UK traders such as Marks and Spencers and other stores and multiples for Cork and elsewhere in Ireland.
In Cork, he also developed the Paul Street Shopping Centre, the North Main Street Shopping Centre, Crestfield in Glanmire, while in Limerick City he built Arthurs Quay on an old city Shannonside site, and he delivered the Carlow Shopping Centre. In Athlone, he developed the Golden Island Shopping Centre in the 1990s, memorably getting tax breaks for it in the dying days of a Fianna Fáil government in 1994.
His largest project by far was the sprawling Liffey Valley in Dublin, the development on the controversial Quarryvale site which brought him into a sharp public focus in the ensuing Mahon Tribunal and its findings of illegal payment to politicians via Frank Dunlop, which he always rejected and continued to fight in the courts for more than a decade.
Liffey Valley, done jointly with the Duke of Westminster’s Grosvenor Estates and now in separate ownership, was controversially developed against then-rival suburban Dublin schemes such as Blanchardstown. Opened in 1998, it eventually enlarged to become one of the country’s largest shopping centres and was sold last year by a consortium of owners to a German pension fund for €630m.
A deal-maker, a risk-taker, incredibly strategic, loyal to a very small core professional team relative to its output, O’Callaghan (who trained as a quantity surveyor in the 1960s) was usually ahead of the pack, and his legacy of what he built and developed is given an extra twist when added to by the things he sought to build — and didn’t get to build.
Those undelivered grand projects include the fantastical 2003 proposal for Vega City, a €7bn series of theme parks for North Dublin on 2,500 acres, to employ 40,000 and drawn 37m visitors a year from around the world.
On a far smaller scale, a decade earlier he had also sought to build a new stadium for the FAI in Neilstown, Co Dublin, as the soccer body was then using IRFU facilities.
He later, along with the enthusiasm of soccer’s Eamon Dunphy, sought to relocate Wimbledon FC in Dublin from South London. That football club moved to Milton Keynes in 2003 and was renamed MK Dons in 2004.
O’Callaghan’s first public and political controversy came in the early 1990s when he endeavoured to buy a large, 17-acre site at Horgan’s Quay from CIÉ, for a technology park to employ up to 1,000. The site hadn’t been publicly tendered for sale, and it blew into a political controversy when Michael Lowry, then a government minister, levelled accusations of the existence of a ‘Golden Circle’. A deal was finally done by CIE last year on a smaller portion of Kent Station/Horgan’s Quay, to Clarendon Properties/BAM, after a 25-year hiatus.
Mr O’Callaghan also proposed a private hospital for a site he’d acquired at the old Jurys Hotel on Western Rd/Lancaster Quay, unsuccessfully seeking special infrastructure designation for its planning. A portion of that site remains undeveloped, but the majority houses high-quality apartments, Lancaster Gate, all fully let, as well as the River Lee Hotel.
Apart from Cork homes and apartments in places such as Ballincollig, Glanmire and Donnybrook/Douglas, O’Callaghan also delivered apartments on Lavitts Quay, and Rochelle on the Old Blackrock Road.
From the first days of Mahon Point’s development, O’Callaghan was committed to delivering an events/conference centre for Cork and some of the Mahon purchase funds were set aside by site vendors City Hall to this end. He lost out last year to a rival bid from BAM/Heineken for the Brewery Quarter site and had argued that as tendered the events centre project was not financially viable.
Last year, he sought planning permission for a considerable office development on his Albert Quay site clustered around Navigation House. He also had full planning for offices at Anderson’s Quay.
O’Callaghan — Owen to just about anyone once he’d met them — had started out house-building in his native Ballincollig after setting up a company there in 1969, and he has continued to build there ever since, following his massive Classes Lake developments there with two current residential projects in train. He was one a handful of Irish builders and developers to continue house-building through the downturn after the property and economic crash.
O’Callaghan became one of the country’s wealthiest developers, with a worth put at several hundred million euro in the 2000s.
After the property crash, a portion of his loans reported to have been about €300m went into Nama, but he was always keen to stress that all his loans were performing.
One of his shocked colleagues said yesterday: “He was everything he shouldn’t have been to be a successful developer: They’re expected to be ruthless and mean, he was always gentlemanly, courteous and generous with his time and advice, he was loyal to his team once they’d proven a trust and he loved Cork. If he was doing a project outside Cork, it just didn’t excite him as much.”
Property developer Owen O’Callaghan was yesterday hailed as a visionary who not only changed the face of Cork but who also had an incredible vision and ambition for Ireland’s second city.
Mr O’Callaghan’s death at Cork University Hospital early yesterday, at the age of 76, came as a shock to many who had, as recently as last week, been very hopeful that he would make a full recovery from his short illness.
Despite his success, he maintained a low-profile and shunned a flash lifestyle — his trademark navy blue 2008 Bentley was one of his few extravagances before he traded it in last year for a Range Rover.
He did, however, speak out publicly on issues close to his heart, including most recently against controversial proposals to merge Cork city and county councils. Arguing for the retention of two local authorities, and for a major extension of the city boundary, he said he would consider relocating his business from the city if the merger went ahead.
Cork Business Association (CBA) director James O’Sullivan, chairman of the OCP-sponsored CBA business awards, knew Mr O’Callaghan well.
Mr O’Sullivan, who is battling cancer, said Mr O’Callaghan would contact him regularly, asking how he was.
“Lots of people are all mouth — they’ll promise you the sun, moon and stars,” Mr O’Sullivan said. “But when Owen said he’d do it, he’d do it. He always delivered.
“He was so passionate about this city. He lived and breathed the city. He was a visionary and a humanitarian and was really good fun to be with.
“While he had major projects in London and Europe, nothing gave him more joy than seeing progress and jobs being created in Cork.
“And while he was often associated with big developments, he was a house builder at heart. He was always very proud of the fact that he put roofs over people’s heads.”
CBA chief executive Lawrence Owens said the physical legacy of Mr O’Callaghan’s vision and commitment to Cork can be seen everywhere.
“He had a deep passion for all things Cork, was enormously proud of his Cork roots and, despite his huge workload, gave generously of his time to organisations such as the CBA, where he was an active, committed and valued member for the last decade,” he said.
Lord Mayor Des Cahill also paid tribute, saying: “He was a visionary who helped transform Cork city into a modern city with iconic developments such as Mahon Point and Opera Lane. He was also a loyal supporter of numerous charitable causes in Cork and was also deeply involved in the arts.”
The Mayor of County Cork, Seamus McGrath, led tributes at yesterday’s county council meeting, praising Mr O’Callaghan’s significant contribution to the county which provided much-needed employment.
Councillor Kevin Murphy, leader of Fine Gael on the council, described Mr O’Callaghan’s death as “a huge loss to the locality”.
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