Monahan, Philip ('Phil')

by Terry Clavin

Monahan, Philip ('Phil') (1928–2003), businessman, was born 27 June 1928 in his family home at Darling Road, Crossbeagh, in Knockbridge parish, just outside Dundalk, Co. Louth, one of five sons of Michael Monahan, labourer and herdsman, of Knockbridge, and his wife Catherine (née Cassidy). He was educated at Knockbridge national school and at the technical college in Dundalk.

After leaving school in 1942, he was an agricultural labourer for two years before spending five years as an apprentice mechanic and fitter at the Dundalk firm of Corry & Wells. In 1949 he returned to the Dundalk technical college, teaching mechanical trades there for nine years while also working as car mechanic: for a year at Gypsum Industries and from 1950 at McCann Fruit Importers. He remained at McCanns for fifteen years, becoming head of the company's motor fleet. A car and aviation enthusiast, he participated in motor races and was a competent amateur flyer, being a member of the Dundalk Aeronautic Club. He married Mary Connor, with whom he had six children, and lived at Carrick Road, Dundalk.

From the early 1960s he bought and sold land in and around Dundalk, initially on a small scale. His property dealings expanded in the mid 1960s when the McCanns chairman, Neil McCann (1924–2011), agreed, along with some local businessmen and banks, to invest in Monahan's assorted business and property ventures. In 1966, Monahan opened a car service station and second-hand motor business in Dundalk. Soon afterwards he founded a fast-growing building contracting firm, Building & Engineering Ltd, employing some 200 workers by 1969. From the mid 1970s, he reduced his involvement in Building & Engineering, disposing of his shareholding in 1980. This was due to the success of Monarch Properties Ltd, his property development vehicle, which employed a team of engineers and architects, but otherwise contracted its labour, initially from Building & Engineering. He dabbled in office development in Dundalk and (less happily) in Belfast, and in industrial property development, contributing to Dundalk industrial estate in the mid 1970s, but he made his fortune in retail development.

In 1972, Galen Weston, the Canadian owner of supermarket multiple Quinnsworth, encouraged Monahan to build a shopping centre on the large site that Monahan owned in the middle of Dundalk, pledging that Quinnsworth would rent 50,000 square feet. Obtaining funding from Cork developer Niall Collins and from Northern Bank, Monahan retained a 40 per cent stake without providing much cash. Completed in 1974, the Dundalk centre was one of the largest in Ireland, comprising 70,000 square feet of shopping space and boasting enclosed, two-storey shopping and modern facilities such as escalators. Offering late opening hours and ample parking, it prospered in defiance of a recession and of pickets established by local traders.

Thereafter, Monahan thrived as a retail development project manager for private and institutional investors, profiting by retaining a significant, but not overly risky, stake in each venture and by earning fees for building supervision, property management and planning advice. He developed retail complexes at Athlone, Co. Westmeath (1974); Navan, Co. Meath (1981); Nutgrove in Rathfarnham, Co. Dublin (1984); Greystones, Co. Wicklow (1984); Drogheda, Co. Louth (1985); Finglas, Co. Dublin (1987); Tallaght, Co. Dublin (1990); and Dún Laoghaire, Co. Dublin (1997). He also developed the Westlink Industrial Estate (1980) and the Monarch Industrial Estate (c.1982–3), both in west Co. Dublin; a small shopping centre at Clonsilla in Dublin (1984); several residential apartment complexes in Dublin (c.1984–5); the Williamstown Mall in Dundalk (1989); a ten-screen cinema multiplex and bowling alley in Coolock, Co. Dublin (1991); and either owned or invested in pubs, restaurants, cinemas, chemist shops, a deer farm, filling stations, car dealerships, a gas distribution venture and an aviation company. Finally, he continued to engage in opportunistic property speculation, most impressively in 1987 when he participated in a high-powered consortium that enacted a spectacular financial coup by acquiring and rapidly disposing of the thirty-three supermarkets formerly owned by the bankrupt H. Williams chain.

Monahan stayed away from building sites, spending his time pursuing development funding, property deals and land rezoning, constantly juggling myriad projects. Only a small fraction came to fruition, partly because he had a predilection for inordinately complex and legalistic business agreements, designed to confer commercial privileges and tax benefits. He was also notoriously choosy. A fluent and affable dissimulator, he exasperated talks partners during negotiations with his brinksmanship and procrastination. He was similarly incorrigible in minimising his expenses, being involved in a number of disputes regarding payment of professional fees, and in maximising his income by exaggerating project management expenses when billing development partners. His obsession with getting the best terms occasionally led him into informal, if not to say irregular, commercial arrangements, which possibly explains his preference for carrying large amounts of cash. This recourse towards furtive deal-making once backfired when he was duped under false pretences into precipitously authorising a land sale during a meeting held on the side of a road.

Employees found him enigmatic and evasive, and one long-serving Monarch executive, wearying of Monahan coming good on a promise to grant him a shareholding in the company, departed in 1996, but not before snatching a plum development from under his boss's nose amid bitter legal proceedings. Jealously cultivating personal relations with property professionals, planning officials and politicians, Monahan kept his counsel regarding future plans, informing senior employees only after he had purchased sites.

He mixed well with politicians, enabling his successful navigation of the planning process and the countervailing efforts of rival developers, local traders and conservationists. Though closest to Fianna Fáil, in the case of his Finglas shopping development he enlisted the support of Fine Gael and the left-wing parties to overcome local Fianna Fáil interests who were opposing the project. He wooed local residents through skilful public relations and donations to community groups and projects. Conversely, he was prepared to stall a development indefinitely in order to force local authorities to dilute their social amenity stipulations and to grant him full site ownership.

Once underway, his retail developments were executed speedily and efficiently with suppliers being promptly paid. He went to great lengths to attract the large supermarkets, agreeing in 1990 to contribute £1 million towards Dunnes Stores' fitting-out costs in Tallaght. In the early 1970s, he piloted light planes over France and took photographs of the sophisticated shopping centres there, which served as a starting point for his architects. By interpreting the latest international trends for an Irish context, he drove an improvement in the standard of indigenous retail developments. Though functional, his centres won international design awards, and their structures and layouts were innovative in Irish terms, ingeniously maximising foot traffic past each retail unit and providing the newest consumer conveniences such as landscaping, crèches, cafés, bars, restaurants and cinemas. In the late 1980s he realized that the VCR's novelty had waned and built multiplexes as part of his Tallaght and Dún Laoghaire shopping developments to meet the renewed demand for cinema facilities in the Dublin suburbs.

Monahan retained full ownership of his first two centres in Dundalk and Athlone, but thereafter switched to trying to sell retail units either to occupiers or investors. He could forego rents because he levied service charges, retaining the property management contract after disposing of his interests in a shopping centre. Traders complained of excessive service charges, but were stymied by obscure legal clauses in their contracts. On behalf of financial institutions, cinemas and supermarkets, he also managed properties that he had not developed. In 1991 observers estimated that Monarch's property services arm was profiting by £400,000 to £800,000 annually from managing a £200 million portfolio.

His conservative approach to financing enabled him to weather, and even exploit, property crashes, most notably during the prolonged 1980s recession when he intensified his activities, moving unchallenged into the Dublin suburbs. That he did so largely without the ostensible aid of investment partners (the financial institutions temporarily abandoned the Irish property sector) in a depressed economy, encouraged innuendos that he was laundering illicit funds, an aspersion readily cast upon self-made businessmen from the Dundalk region, which was a hotbed for smugglers. Of further relevance is his association from the early 1970s with an elite network of private investors of whom many were implicated in intricate tax evasion schemes involving offshore bank accounts. (In 1972, prior to the introduction of currency controls prohibiting such tax avoidance stratagems, Monahan established a Cayman Island trust but never used it.)

The mid 1980s was a fraught period as his debts mounted, many of his tenants fell into arrears, and the Nutgrove centre suffered when its two biggest retailers withdrew during 1986–7. Monahan retrieved matters by demonstrating an uncanny facility for closing sales that defied all apparent commercial logic. The 1988 disposal of most of Monarch's assets, including all its shopping-centre interests, to a British fund had particularly curious features, given that the relevant fund manager was later prosecuted by the British police for accepting bribes in return for sanctioning UK deals. Due to a delay in closing the transaction, the price jumped from an already generous £23 million to £24.2 million and a supermarket was excluded from the sale.

This deal funded the signal triumph of Monahan's career, the Tallaght shopping centre. Upon buying out the original developers in 1984, he was faced with an unappealing prospect: a mid-sized centre catering for a deprived area. Despite a sod-turning ceremony in December 1985, the site lay idle, infuriating the locals, who suffered from a lack of shopping facilities. Monahan was holding out for state aid and permission for a larger centre, which, thanks to its location on the capital's western approaches and to an improving road network, would represent a potential regional shopping magnet. From the mid 1980s, he retained the services of Fianna Fáil politician Liam Lawlor (qv), an expert in planning procedures but also the key intermediary in the corrupt relations between Dublin county councillors and property developers.

Following the election of a Fianna Fáil government in 1987, Monahan obtained permission for a bigger centre and the granting to Tallaght of attractive tax incentives, both for developers and for prospective tenants and property purchasers. These incentives were surprisingly denied to a rival development in nearby Blanchardstown, which did not proceed for some years as a result. (The planning tribunal later investigated the decision to award tax-designated status to Tallaght, discovering an unusual Monarch payment of £850,000 partly relating to the securing of the tax designation, and that Lawlor received £56,300 in October 1990 from Monarch partly for services performed for the Tallaght project.)

With British financial institution Guardian Royal Exchange (GRE) as his joint partner, Monahan completed the £50–£60 million Tallaght project, known as The Square, in 1990 after a 22-month development. The Square was the largest shopping centre in Ireland, and the first to operate on a regional scale, offering over 500,000 square feet of retail space spread across nine large stores and 130 smaller units. It attracted the main retail chains and institutional investors whose desire for tax write-offs enabled Monahan to charge a handsome premium and emerge a multi-millionaire from the disposal of Monarch's property interests in the Square during 1989–94.

Fearing abduction for ransom, he kept a low profile, but was indisputably Ireland's foremost property developer, in 1988 buying as his residence a nineteenth-century mansion and estate with fifteen acres of secluded gardens at Somerton in Castleknock, Co. Dublin. He owned a helicopter, twenty-four vintage cars, and a string of racehorses. A generous patron of the arts, music and sport, he sponsored an international drama festival in Dundalk and the Dublin Theatre Festival. In 1990 he suffered a heart attack necessitating a successful by-pass operation. As a diabetic, he continued to experience ill health and became less active while maintaining his sway over Monarch.

His prospects of gently drifting into retirement were shattered when in the early 1990s an ambitious housing, retail and office development in partnership with GRE on 246 expensively-acquired acres at Cherrywood in south Co. Dublin faltered before well-organised opposition from the affluent local residents. Despite an extensive publicity campaign, which proved counter-productive, and the suborning of county councillors through political donations, food-and-drink hospitality, and cash payments, normally biddable politicians proved unreliable amid the intense controversy and he lost a crucial planning vote in Dublin county council in 1992. The manner in which property developers provided financial patronage to politicians on a personal, rather than on a party, basis had adverse consequences for Monahan in this instance as it seemingly encouraged uncoordinated mischief-making by individual councillors aiming to exploit a tight vote with a view to securing more largesse for themselves.

Monahan's difficulties in Cherrywood, and in west Dublin where he suffered further reverses in seeking to rezone land for residential development, undermined his efforts to achieve a stock listing with a view to tapping market funding for future developments. He aimed at taking over a listed company by selling it Monarch's property assets in return for shares – a convoluted method that circumvented some of the costs and financial disclosure obligations incumbent upon stock market flotations. During 1989–94, negotiations with various small listed companies all foundered because of Monarch's refusal to furnish audited accounts, heightening suspicions that the company was deeply indebted. A failed hostile takeover of Ewart in 1992 (leading the stock exchange takeover panel in London to investigate alleged wrongful collusion between Monahan and other shareholders) left Monahan nursing a £4 million loss when he sold his 29 per cent shareholding in the company.

Close to bankruptcy, he combatively relished the crisis, and redoubled his efforts in Cherrywood, dangling the prospect of a science and technology park development before a local authority desperate for new sources of rates. During 1992–3, Monarch abandoned plans for a large shopping development in Cherrywood and acquired two sites in Dún Laoghaire for development, placating councillors in that borough who had feared that the Cherrywood scheme would commercially undermine their electoral district. Finally, in March 1993 he engaged the services of Frank Dunlop, a former government press agent turned lobbyist who later admitted to bribing councillors on Monarch's behalf.

On 11 November 1993, Dublin county council voted to permit four houses per acre (instead of a commercially unviable one house per acre) to be built on the lands zoned as residential, opening up Cherrywood for development and facilitating Monarch's sale of ninety-four acres of residential land. Simultaneous successes in securing residential zonings for Monahan's west Dublin properties further improved his equity position. Over the next four years, Monarch achieved its Cherrywood planning objectives piecemeal: lands zoned agricultural were converted for the use of a science and technology park, residential density levels were increased, and a retail restriction was lifted.

Suspecting bribery, in 1995 conservationists prominent in the Cherrywood campaign advertised a £10,000 reward for information relating to corruption in the planning system, leading to the establishment two years later of the tribunal of inquiry into planning matters and payments. The tribunal's investigations demonstrated that during 1991–7 Monarch paid £127,515 to over sixty politicians and to political parties, mostly to Fianna Fáil. In February 1991, Monahan personally donated £25,000 to the party. Individuals in other parties also benefited, and Monarch employees were prominent at Fine Gael fundraisers after that party came to power in late 1994. The tribunal also uncovered Monarch payments of £162,885 in cash to unidentified individuals between 1992 and 1996, mainly occurring at pivotal moments during Monarch's Cherrywood rezoning campaign, and payments of £85,000 to Dunlop and £82,800 to Lawlor.

In 1997 Monarch sold most of its properties, including the undeveloped Cherrywood site, to the listed company Dunloe House, which was controlled by Noel Smyth, a tax solicitor with whom Monahan had a longstanding but volatile business relationship. Monahan received a lucrative consultancy contract and a 12 per cent shareholding in Dunloe House. Retaining a 6.7 per cent stake, he clashed with Smyth over the company's indifferent performance, and from 2000 associated with dissident shareholder Liam Carroll. When Carroll took the company into private ownership in 2002, Monahan received some €12.5 million for his shares, nearly twice their cost.

Meanwhile, Monarch Properties continued on a small scale, moving into hotel and golf course development. Monahan retired as Monarch chief executive in 2001, making way for his son Paul. A widower, he intended remarrying but before doing so died 3 August 2003 in the Blackrock Clinic, Co. Dublin, being buried in Kilkerley Cemetery, Dundalk. He left €27 million in his will. His estate later settled with Revenue, paying €543,421 for under-declaring income. In 2012 the final report of the planning tribunal concluded that Monahan and three other Monarch executives had participated in or were aware of secret corrupt payments to councillors for the purposes of achieving the Cherrywood rezoning, describing this as constituting an assault on democracy.