You won’t BELIEVE the CRAZY solution this Irish developer has for Dublin’s housing crisis!

For years, Johnny Ronan’s skyscraper plans for Dublin have been blocked by regulators. The Irish property mogul has now turned his sights down with a dockside project, but insists the only way out of the city’s housing crisis is to build upwards.

The 69-year-old businessman, whose flamboyant lifestyle embodied the excesses of the Irish Celtic tiger as much as his buildings shaped the capital’s skyline, sealed a multi-million pound deal last month to move forward with a new deep water port at Bremore, north of Dublin.

The plan comes after criticism in a letter to Dublin Port from Green Party leader and government coalition partner Eamon Ryan the sustainability of the existing plant at the mouth of the Liffey, which is expected to run out of capacity by 2040 notwithstanding 400 million euros third phase of upgrades in a total renovation plan of 1.9 billion euros.

Some companies have even called for Dublin Port to be relocated away from the city’s shores, freeing up some 260 hectares of land as Ireland wrestles with a severe housing crisis. Ryan agreed that part of the area could be used for housing, but the port has long rejected any relocation as unnecessary and building houses on the land as unfeasible.

Ronan — who became the epitome of the property-driven boom-to-bust cycle in Ireland after his company, Treasury Holdings, went bankrupt in 2012 and he spent three years in state administration — is careful to avoid that question.

“This is a decision for the government,” he told the Financial Times in a rare interview. “We’re not trying to get our hands on land.”

His business, Ronan Group Real Estate, is involved with France’s EDF and Fred Olsen Seawind in the Codling Park offshore wind farm which has successful bid for the supply of 1,300 MW to the national electricity grid. Ronan believes Bremore could become a production hub for “green” hydrogen – produced using offshore wind energy – as Ireland aims to source 80% of its energy from renewable sources by 2030.

However, he says the re-use of the Dublin Port site would be “transformative”. IrelandThe central bank has warned that a lack of housing is a drag on the economy, but developers like Ronan are being criticized for building rental properties that many people find too expensive.

One solution, he argues, is the development of taller, higher-density buildings, an argument that has put him on a collision course with planning authorities. Days before speaking to the FT from his home in the mountains south of the capital, he lost a planning appeal to build a 10-storey apartment block in central Dublin.

“If they continue like this, the housing crisis will never be solved,” said Ronan. Her distinctive shoulder-length hair with its white badger streak is now gray, but his language is still full of colorful curses.

With Treasury, which he co-owned with Richard Barrett, Ronan was behind some of Dublin’s most eye-catching buildings, including the Convention Center designed by award-winning architect Kevin Roche, which stands like a tilted tin on the banks of the Liffey, and the European Headquarters.

The son of a Tipperary pig farmer and now a tax resident of Malta, Ronan counts among his regrets the failure to gain ownership of the Empire State Building. He has a personality worthy of the towers he wants to build: at the height of the Irish financial crisis, he flew to Morocco on his private jet with former Miss World Rosanna Davison “for the craic [fun]”.

His business once extended into China and he owned Battersea Power Station in London until Ireland borrowed, causing the Treasury to collapse.

Since he left the government National Agency for Wealth Management, his business has recovered. He built the Dublin HQ for Amazon and Salesforce, is finishing a campus for Meta and has started work on a new HQ for City.

He owns Ronan Group Real Estate with his three children and has a pipeline of projects in the planning or pre-planning stages totaling 2.5 million square feet of office space and 5,900 residential units with a total gross development value of approximately € 5.2 billion. The company declined to give financial details, but said it had capital assets in 11 prime buildings, mostly offices, around Dublin worth around €250m.

Ronan claims the skyscraper has gotten a bad rap; rather than American-style high-rises in Dublin’s elegant Georgian heart, it plans for “higher density with some taller buildings” away from the centre. “With reasonable density, you can still provide a tremendous amount of housing,” he said.

But planners in 2021 rejected his offer to build two 40-story towers in the city’s port areas, and Ronan is still peeved that authorities have rejected his plans for two more floors on the 11-story Salesforce Tower, which opened last month.

Ireland’s complex planning process is being reformed, but Ronan is generally outspoken about the consequences of the current “broken” system: “Salesforce said if you can build two more floors we can bring in another 1,000 jobs,” he said. stated. Salesforce declined to comment.

He noted the irony that Irish fertilizer baron Sir Basil Goulding and his wife Valerie built a characterful modernist summer house in 1972 in the rolling gardens of what is now Ronan’s home, without planning permission.

Near the Spencer Place luxury housing development, where it has drawn criticism for rents of €2,600 to €2,700, Ronan said there was land that could not be built on because it was earmarked for a long-delayed Dublin Metrolink that didn’t see it happen for at least a couple of decades. “For God’s sake, we’ll all be dead [by then]’ he snorted. Metrolink hopes it will be operational in the early 2030s, depending on usually lengthy planning and procurement processes.

He remains a proponent of office work, even if the Central Bank last week warned that office space occupancy declined in the first quarter.

On the Citi building, “we’re talking to four serious big occupiers,” for the 250,000 square feet still up for grabs there, including a “major American group that has some presence [in Ireland]Ronan said. RGRE had also purchased the old Citi premises and was in talks to redevelop them, he added.

The company is also building a mixed development on the site of an old glass bottle factory with US asset manager Oaktree and private equity firm Blackstone.

Despite a break with former partner DigitalBridge (formerly called Colony Capital), he is pragmatic in having to rely on “expensive money” from private equity firms to fund his plans.

“You need the capital, that simple,” he gasped. “Irish banks are great, but they no longer lend onshore. . .[they’re]very cautious. Maybe too cautious.