Johnny Ronan: 'The Irish banks, they’re great, but they don’t lend on land any more ...[they’re] very prudent. Maybe too prudent'
Mr Ronan – who came to symbolise the country’s property-driven boom-to-bust cycle after his firm, Treasury Holdings, crashed into insolvency in 2012 and spent three years in state administration – is careful to skirt that question.His business, Ronan Group Real Estate, is involved with France’s EDF and Fred Olsen Seawind in the Codling Park offshore wind farm that has successfully bid to supply 1,300MW to the national power grid.
One solution, he maintains, is higher-rise, higher-density development, a subject that has put him on a collision course with planning authorities. He recently lost a planning appeal to build a 10-storey apartment block in central Dublin.
Mr Ronan argues that high rise has had a bad rap; rather than US-style skyscrapers in Dublin’s elegant Georgian heart, he envisages “higher density with some taller buildings” away from the centre. “With reasonable density, you can still deliver a huge amount of housing,” he said. He noted the irony that Irish fertiliser baron Sir Basil Goulding and his wife Valerie built a distinctive modernist summer house in 1972 in the rolling gardens of what is now Mr Ronan’s home, without planning permission.
On the Citi building, “we are talking to four serious big occupiers,” for the 250,000sq ft still up for grabs there, including a “big American outfit that has some presence [in Ireland],” Ronan said. RGRE had also bought Citi’s old premises and was in talks to redevelop them, he added.
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