DENIS O’BRIEN
BUSINESSMAN Denis O’Brien is quoted in Ireland Inc as saying that although he believes now is a great time to invest in Ireland he is “worried about the property market”.
“If you look at the paper, there are hundreds of properties for sale, whereas two years ago there may have been 20 advertised for sale. It’s just gone through the roof again; I’m concerned about that. I’m concerned about the way these hedge funds are treating Irish borrowers; there was no duty of care to these people. I thought the way [Cork-based developer] Michael O’Flynn was treated was appalling,” said O’Brien, who is a shareholder in Independent News & Media which publishes this newspaper.
O’Brien recalled in the book where he had received financial backing in his early career to assemble radio assets. “One of the reasons why I’m thankful to Anglo Irish Bank is because they lent me the money to do that — and that would never have happened without Anglo. The process they put me through in 1990 was a really rigorous credit process and we borrowed about IR£1.8 million from them. I was interviewed by so many different people and they even brought me to dinner! I’d never had a banker bring me out to dinner. I remember [senior Anglo figure] Bill Barrett bringing me to the dogs to see if I had any vices, like did I own any greyhounds or was I a gambler.”
The media landscape is “becoming more fragmented and brutal”, said O’Brien. “We’ve had to reinvent management teams in nearly all our businesses in the media area, and that has been a very difficult task. There is a big surge in work going on online that takes money to build revenues, but revenues will be there in two or three years’ time — you just have to swallow the costs at the moment, which we’re doing.”
O’Brien also raised his concern that the Irish education system is not up to the standards needed to service a knowledge-based economy. “I think we have lost our way over the last five years in terms of education. I think there is ambition within the university sector, but to be ambitious you have to attract investment and philanthropy. When you read about Ireland’s falling rankings I’d say all the donors to all the universities are increasingly unhappy and saying: what is going on? I think the universities here need to do another divide-up – and UCD should specialise even more in some areas, and Trinity should do the same,” he said.