And Thereby Hangs a Tale

11. The Luck of the Irish*

No one would believe this tale unless they were told that an Irishman was involved.

Liam Casey was born in Cork, the son of a tinker. One of many things he learned from his shrewd father was that while a wise man can spend all day making a few bob, a foolish one can lose them in a few minutes.

During Liam’s lifetime, he made over a hundred million ‘few bobs’, but despite his father’s advice, he still managed to lose them all in a few minutes.

After Liam left school, he didn’t consider going to university, explaining to his friends that he wanted to join the real world. Liam quickly discovered that you also had to graduate from the University of Life before you could place your foot on the first rung of the ladder to fortune. After a few false starts, as a petrol pump attendant, bus conductor and door-to-door Encyclopaedia Britannica salesman, Liam ended up as a trainee with Hamptons, an established English estate agent that had branches all over Ireland.

He spent the next three years learning about the value of property, commercial and residential, the setting and collecting of rents, and how to close a deal on terms that ensured you made a profit but didn’t lose a customer. The average person will move house five times during their lifetime, the English manager informed Liam, so you need to retain their confidence.

‘I wish I’d been James Joyce’s estate agent,’ was all Liam had to say on the subject.

‘Why?’ asked the Englishman, sounding puzzled.

‘He moved house over a hundred times during his lifetime.’ It was about the only thing Liam could remember about James Joyce.

Working for an English company, Liam quickly discovered that if you have a gentle Irish brogue and are graced with enough charm, the invaders have a tendency to underestimate you — a mistake the English have made for over a thousand years.

Another important lesson he learned, and one they certainly don’t teach you at any university, was that the only difference between a tinker and a merchant banker is the sum of money that changes hands. However, Liam couldn’t work out how to take advantage of this knowledge until he met Maggie McBride.

Maggie didn’t consider the tinker’s son from Cork to be much of a catch, even if he was good-looking and fun to be with, but when he invited her to join him for a holiday in Majorca, she began to show a little more interest.

Liam’s current account at the Allied Irish Bank was just enough in credit for him to be able to afford a package holiday to Magaluf, a resort on the south-west coast of the island, which for three months of every year is taken over by the British.

Maggie was not impressed when they booked into a one-star hotel and were shown to a room with a double bed. She made it absolutely clear that she might have agreed to come on holiday with Liam, but that didn’t mean they would be sleeping together. Liam booked himself into a separate room, which he knew would stretch his budget to the limit. Another lesson learned. Before you sign a contract, check the small print.

The next day Liam was lying next to Maggie on an over-crowded beach in a pair of tight-fitting swimming trunks, becoming redder and redder by the minute. His mother had once told him that the Irish have the greenest grass and the whitest skins on earth, but he had not, until then, realized the significance of the second part of her statement.

On the second day, Liam, still having failed to make any progress with Maggie, was beginning to wonder why he’d bothered to take her on holiday in the first place. But then he discovered that the thousand Englishwomen walking up and down the beach had only one thing on their minds — and a handsome young Irishman who would be disappearing back to Cork in two weeks’ time ticked most of their boxes.

Liam was telling a girl from Doncaster how he’d discovered Riverdance when she said, ‘You’re getting very red.’ So red that he had to lie on his stomach all night, quite unable to move, which was not at all what the girl from Doncaster had planned.

The next morning Liam smothered himself with factor thirty suncream, put on a long-sleeved shirt and long trousers, ignored the signs to the beach and took a bus into Palma, wondering if it would turn out to be just another Magaluf.

The medieval capital took him by surprise, with its wide streets lined with palm trees and flower baskets, and the narrow alleys with picturesque pavement restaurants and stylish boutiques. He could have been in a different country.

As he strolled down the Paseo Maritimo, Liam found himself stopping to look in the estate agents’ windows. He was surprised how cheap the houses were compared to Cork, and even more surprised to discover that the banks were offering 80, sometimes even 90 per cent mortgages.

He considered entering one of the estate agents’ offices, as he had a hundred questions he wanted answering, but as he couldn’t speak a word of Spanish, he satisfied himself with looking in the windows and admiring the large colour photographs of properties described as deseable, asequible, sensational. He was thinking of returning to Magaluf when he spotted a familiar green, white and orange flag flapping in the wind outside a shopfront with a sign which announced, ‘Patrick O’Donovan, International Real Estate Co.’

Liam pushed open the front door without bothering to look in the window. As he stepped into the office, a smartly dressed woman looked up, and an older man, unshaven and wearing soiled jeans and a T-shirt, swung his feet off a desk and smiled.

‘I was just wondering—’ began Liam.

‘A fellow Irishman!’ exclaimed the man, leaping up. ‘Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Patrick O’Donovan.’

‘Liam Casey,’ said Liam, shaking him by the hand.

‘Is it to be business or pleasure, Liam?’ asked O’Donovan.

‘I’m not quite sure,’ Liam replied, ‘but as I’m here on holiday—’

‘Then it’s pleasure,’ said O’Donovan. ‘So let’s begin our relationship as any self-respecting Irishmen should. Maria, if anyone calls, my friend and I can be found at the Flanagan Arms.’

Without another word, O’Donovan led Liam out of the office, across the road and into a side alley where they entered a pub few tourists would ever come across. The next words O’Donovan uttered were, ‘Two pints of Guinness’, without asking his new-found friend what he would like.

Liam was able to get through most of his questions while O’Donovan was still sober. He learned that Patrick had been living on the island for over thirty years, and was convinced that Majorca was about to take off like California at the time of the gold rush. O’Donovan went on to tell Liam that the island was attracting a record number of tourists but, more important, it had recently become the most popular destination for Brits who wanted to spend their retirement years abroad.

‘When I set up my agency,’ he told Liam between gulps of his third Guinness, ‘it was long before Majorca became fashionable. In those days there were only a dozen of us in the business; now, everybody on the island thinks they’re an estate agent. I’ve done well, can’t complain, but I only wish I was your age.’

‘Why?’ asked Liam innocently.

‘We’re about to enter a boom period,’ said O’Donovan. ‘An ageing population with disposable incomes and an awareness of their own mortality are migrating here like a flock of starlings searching for warmer climes.’

By the fifth Guinness, Liam had only one or two more questions left to ask. Not that it mattered, as O’Donovan was no longer capable of answering them.

The next morning, and every morning for the following week, Liam did not join Maggie on the overcrowded beaches but took the bus that was heading into Palma. He had some serious research to carry out before he met up with Patrick O’Donovan again.

During the day, he made appointments with several estate agents to view apartments and other properties. What he was shown confirmed O’Donovan’s opinion — Majorca was about to enter a period of rapid growth.

On the final morning of his holiday, having not once returned to the beach in the past ten days, even though his red Majorca skin had faded back to Irish white, Liam boarded the bus to Palma for the last time.

Once he’d been dropped off in the city centre, he headed straight for the Paseo Maritimo and didn’t stop walking until he reached the offices of Patrick O’Donovan, International Real Estate Co. He had only one more question to ask his fellow countryman. ‘Would you consider taking me on as a junior partner?’

‘Certainly not,’ said O’Donovan. ‘But I would consider taking you on as a partner.’

Maggie McBride flew back to Ireland, virgo intacta, while the tinker from Cork remained in Majorca.

Liam’s first year in Majorca didn’t turn out to be quite the bonanza his new partner had promised, despite his working night and day and making full use of the skills he’d honed in Cork. While he spent most of his days in the office or showing clients around properties, O’Donovan spent more and more of his time in the Flanagan Arms, drinking away the company’s dwindling profits.

By the end of his second year, Liam was considering returning to Ireland, which was experiencing its own economic boom, fuelled by massive grants from the European Union. And then, without warning, the decision was taken out of his hands. O’Donovan failed to return to work after the pub had closed for the afternoon siesta. He’d dropped dead in the street a hundred yards from the office.

Liam organized Patrick’s funeral, held a wake at the Flanagan Arms and was the last to leave the pub that night. By the time he crawled into bed at three in the morning, he’d made a decision.

The first person he called after arriving at the office the next day was a sign-writer he’d found in the Yellow Pages. By twelve o’clock, the name above the door read ‘Casey & Co, International Estate Agents’.

The second phone call Liam made was to Pepe Miro, a young man who worked for a rival company and had beaten him to several deals in the past two years. They agreed to meet in a tapas bar that evening, and after another late night, during which a José Ferrer L. Rosado replaced Guinness, Liam was able to convince Pepe they would both be better off working together as partners.

A month later, a Spanish flag was raised beside the Irish one, and the sign-writer returned. When he left, the name above the door read, ‘Casey, Miro & Co.’ While Pepe handled the natives, Liam took care of any foreign intruders; a genuine partnership.

The new company’s profits grew slowly to begin with, but at least the graph was now heading in the right direction. But it wasn’t until Pepe told his new partner about an old local custom that their fortunes began to change.

Majorca is a small island with a large, fertile, central plain where vineyards, almond and olive trees thrive. Traditionally, when a Majorcan farmer dies, he leaves any property in the fertile heartland to his eldest son, while any daughters end up with small pieces of craggy coastline. Liam’s Irish charm and good looks did no harm when he advised these daughters how they could benefit from this chauvinistic injustice.

He purchased his first plot of land in 1991, from a middle-aged lady who was short of cash and boyfriends: a tiny strip of infertile coastline with uninterrupted views of the Mediterranean. A bulldozer levelled the ground, and within a few weeks, after a bunch of itinerant workers had cleaned up the site, a developer purchased the plot for almost double Liam’s original outlay.

Liam bought his second piece of land from a grieving widow. It had splendid panoramic views all the way to Barcelona. Once again he flattened the plot, and this time he built a path wide enough to allow a car to reach it from the main road. On this occasion he made an even larger return, which he used to build a small house on a piece of land Pepe had purchased from a lady who spoke only Spanish. A year later they sold the property for triple their original investment.

By the time Liam had purchased their fourth piece of coastal land, which was large enough to divide into three plots, he realized he was no longer an estate agent but had unwittingly become a property developer. While Pepe continued to woo an endless stream of Spanish daughters and widows, Liam converted their scraggy inheritances into saleable properties. As time went by and the company’s profits increased, it became clear to Liam that the only obstacle preventing him from progressing at an even more rapid pace was a lack of capital. He decided to make one of his rare trips back to Ireland.

The property manager of the Allied Irish Bank in Dublin — Liam avoided Cork — listened with interest to the proposals put forward by his fellow countryman, and eventually agreed to advance him a hundred thousand pounds with which to purchase two new sites. When Liam delivered a profit of over 40 per cent the following year, the bank agreed to double its investment.

Liam closed his first million-pound deal in 1997, and his success might have continued unabated, if only he’d recalled his father’s sound advice. While a wise man can spend all day making a few bob, a foolish one can lose them in a few minutes.

On the evening of 31 December 1999, Liam and Pepe held a party for their friends and clients at the Palace Hotel in Palma to celebrate their good fortune. As they were now both millionaires, they had every reason to look forward to the new millennium with confidence, especially as Pepe announced, just before the sun rose on 1 January 2000, that he had come across the deal of a lifetime. Liam had to wait two more days before Pepe had recovered sufficiently to tell him the details.

A Majorcan from one of the oldest families on the island had recently died intestate. After some considerable legal wrangling, the court had decided that his wife was entitled to inherit his entire estate — an area of land in Valldemossa that stretched for several kilometres, from the slopes of the Sierra de Tramuntana all the way down to the coast.

Liam spent a week in Dublin trying to convince the Allied Irish that it should put up the largest property loan in its history. Once the bank had agreed terms, which included personal guarantees from both Liam and Pepe, something Liam’s tinker father would never have advised, he returned to Majorca and began to conduct negotiations with the widow. She finally agreed to sell her two-thousand-hectare site for twenty-three million euros.

Within days, Liam had hired a leading architect from Barcelona, a highly respected surveyor from Madrid and a well-connected lawyer in Palma, and began to prepare the necessary documents to ensure that outline planning permission would be granted by the local council. They divided the land into 360 individual plots that included roads with broad pavements, street lighting, electricity, drainage and sewerage, an eighteen-hole golf course, a shopping centre, a cinema, eleven restaurants and a sports complex. Every home would have its own swimming pool, while some of the larger plots would even have their own tennis courts. But the feature that made the development unique was that whichever house a customer purchased, from the top of the mountain all the way down to the coast, they were guaranteed an uninterrupted view of the ocean.

Liam and Pepe both accepted that because of the huge amount of work involved with the project, it would be years before they could consider taking on any other commitments.

Liam had a large-scale model of the site built, and commissioned a documentary film maker to produce a twenty-minute promotional video entitled Valldemossa Vision. The Allied Irish Bank clearly bought into this vision, and released an initial two point three million euros to Liam as a deposit on the land.

It was another year before Liam was ready to present his outline planning application to the Consell Insular de Mallorca. When Liam rose to make his speech to the Valldemossa council, every elected member was seated in his place. He took them slowly through his master plan, and when his presentation came to an end, he called for questions.

If only to persuade people they haven’t fallen asleep, politicians always have well-prepared questions to hand. However, Liam’s experts had spent hours anticipating each and every question they were asked, and others that hadn’t even been thought of. When Liam finally sat down, he was greeted by warm applause from both main political parties.

The governor of the Balearics rose to congratulate Liam and his team on a splendid and imaginative scheme, while the Mayor of Valldemossa enthusiastically assured his colleagues that the project would undoubtedly attract wealthy residents, ensuring increased revenue for the council’s coffers for many years to come.

No one was surprised when, six weeks later, the Consell Insular de Mallorca granted outline planning permission to Casey, Miro & Co. for its Valldemossa project, which the mayor described to the press as bold, imaginative and of civic importance. But Pepe had already warned Liam there was one more hurdle that had to be negotiated before they could return to the bank and ask for the remaining twenty point seven million euros of their advance. It was still necessary for the Supreme Court in Madrid to rubber-stamp the whole project before the first bulldozer would be allowed on the site, and the court was well known for rejecting projects at the last moment.

Three different sets of lawyers worked night and day in Madrid, Barcelona and Palma, and nine months later to everyone’s relief the Supreme Court gave its imprimatur.

The following day Liam flew to Dublin, where even more lawyers were working on the documentation that would allow him to be able to draw on a rolling fifty-million-euro loan. Building costs only ever go in one direction.

Within minutes of the ink drying on the paper, four of the leading construction companies in Europe were driving their vehicles on to the site, followed by over a thousand workers who were looking forward to being employed for the next ten years.

Liam had never taken a great deal of interest in Majorcan politics, and he made a point of not supporting either main party when it came to the local elections. He made it a policy to donate exactly the same amount to the campaign funds of both the major parties so he could continue to deal with whichever one was in power.

Over the years, it had always been a close-run thing between the Partido Socialista Obrero Español and the Partido Popular, with power changing hands every few years. But to everyone’s surprise, when the election result was announced from the town hall steps later that year, the Green Party had captured three seats and, more important, held the balance of power, as the other two parties were evenly split with twenty-one seats each. Liam didn’t give the result a great deal of thought, even when the Mallorca Daily Bulletin informed its readers that the Greens would join a coalition with whichever party was willing to support their ideological aims. The most important of which, as had been stated in their manifesto, was not to grant any future planning permission in Valldemossa.

This suited Liam as it would cut out any further rivals, making his the last project to be approved by the Supreme Court in Madrid. But once the resolution had been passed in council, with the backing of both main parties, the Greens, encouraged by their success, immediately announced that any projects currently underway should have their planning permission rescinded. This time Liam was concerned, because his lawyers warned him that even if the Supreme Court eventually overruled the council’s decision, his project could be held up for years.

‘Every day we’re not working will cost us money,’ Liam warned Pepe. He realized that if the Greens were able to get either of the two main parties to support their proposal, he and Pepe would be bankrupt within weeks.

When the council met to take a vote on the Greens’ resolution, Liam and his team sat nervously in the public gallery waiting to learn their fate. Passionate speeches were made from all sides of the chamber, and even after the last councillor had offered his opinion, no one could be sure how the numbers would fall.

The chief clerk called for the vote, and for the first time that evening the chamber fell silent. A few minutes later the Mayor solemnly announced that the Greens’ proposal to rescind all current planning permissions had been carried by twenty-three votes to twenty-two.

Liam had lost all his few bobs in a few minutes.

Every one of his workers immediately deserted the site. Unfinished houses were left without doors or windows, cranes stood unmanned and expensive equipment and materials were left to rust. By the time Liam recalled his late father’s wise advice, it was too late to turn the clock back.

The company’s lawyers recommended an appeal. Liam reluctantly agreed, although, as they had pointed out to him, even if they were eventually able to overturn the council’s decision, by then years would have passed and any possible profit would have been swallowed up by interest payments alone, not to mention lawyers’ fees.

The Allied Irish Bank quickly responded to the news from Valldemossa by placing an immediate stop order on all Liam’s accounts. They also issued a directive instructing Casey, Miro & Co, and any of its associates, to repay the outstanding thirty-seven-million-euro loan at the first possible opportunity, although it must have known that neither Liam nor Pepe could any longer afford the airfare to Dublin.

Liam informed the bank that he intended to appeal against the council’s decision, but he knew, and so did they, that even if he won, they still would have lost everything by the time the Supreme Court reached its verdict.

An appeal date was set for the Supreme Court of Madrid to sit in judgement on the Valldemossa project, but before then Liam and Pepe had been forced to sell their homes, as well as what was left of the company’s assets, to pay lawyers’ bills on both sides of the Irish Sea.

Liam returned to the Flanagan Arms for the first time in twenty-three years.

When Liam and Pepe appeared before the Supreme Court two years later, the senior panel judge expressed considerable sympathy for Mr Casey and Mr Miro, as they had invested ten years of hard work, as well as their personal fortunes, in a project that both the Valldemossa council and the Supreme Court had considered to be bold, imaginative and of civic importance. However, the court did not have the authority to overturn the decision of an elected council, even when it was retrospective. Liam bowed his head.

‘Nevertheless,’ the judge continued, ‘this court does have the authority to award compensation in full to the appellants, who carried out their business in good faith, and fulfilled every obligation required of them by the Valldemossa council. With that in mind, this court will appoint an independent arbitrator to assess the costs Mr Casey and Mr Miro have incurred, which will include any projected losses.’

As Spaniards were involved, it was another year before the arbitrator presented his findings to the Supreme Court, which necessitated a further six months of making some minor adjustments to the costs so that no one would be in any doubt about how seriously the court had taken their responsibilities.

The day after the senior judge announced the court’s findings, El Pais suggested in its leader that the size of the award was a warning to all politicians not to consider making retrospective legislation in the future.

The Valldemossa Council was ordered to pay 121 million euros in compensation to Mr Liam Casey, Mr Pepe Miro and their associates.

At the local council election held six months later, the Green Party lost all three of its seats by overwhelming majorities.

Pepe took over the business in Majorca, while Liam retired to Cork, where he purchased a castle with a hundred acres of land. He tells me he has no intention of seeking planning permission, even for an outhouse.

Observant readers who have followed the timescale during which this story took place might feel that even if the Green Party had failed to overturn Liam and Pepe’s planning permission, they would have gone bankrupt anyway following the sudden downturn in the world’s economy, and without being paid any compensation. But, as I said at the outset, no one would believe this tale unless they were told that an Irishman was involved.