For Whom the Bridge Tolls

From a study in his Blackrock, Co. Dublin, home, Tom Roche directs multi-million projects as if it were the most natural thing in the world. There is a traffic problem in Dublin, so Roche decided to build a bridge.

The costs of transporting LPG in small quantities cut the margins for those distributing it, so Roche plans to excavate three large caverns in the limestone under Dublin Bay which can be filled with LPG; from ocean-going tankers. The market for acids and solvents is expanding in the chemical and engineering industries and in agri-business, so Roche proposes to erect a chemicals tank farm on 4 1/2 acres beside the river Boyne in Drogheda. Already, he has challenged the monopolies in petrol and LPG from businesses on neighbouring sites. 

Of course, Tom Roche has Justin Keating as well as his entrepreneurial achievements to thank for the possibility of taking on ventures like this. The state's third and final payment of £2.385 million to the shareholders of Bula Ltd. (in return for precisely what is not yet clear) came through just over a year ago. The total paid out on foot of the September 1975 agreement between Bula and Justin Keating, the then Minister for Industry and Commerce, comes to £9.54 million, 80 per cent of it going to Bula Holdings, which represents the interests of Tom Roche's family, the Wood family, with whom he has been associated for thirty years in Roadstone, and his son in-law, Michael Wymes.

In several different permutations, the Tom Roches, senior and junior, Richard Wood and Wymes, have become involved in a wide range of speculative and not-so-speculative investments. Individually and as a group, they have interests in the Chevron/ICI and Aran/BP blocks in the Porcupine Bank offshore exploration area. Their "carried interest" in the former means they do not have to shoulder any of the exploration costs. Their combined stakes in the Aran/BP venture could yield them more than that which would go to Aran Energy if the exploration is successful.

Not all of the Roche investments are quite so clearly gilt-edged. Through Ashgill Ltd., in which the Roche company, Conor Holdings, held over one third of the shares, they attempted unsuccessfully to rescue the ailing Donegal firm, Irish Picture Mouldings. But Murva Manufacturing, the vehicle for that take-over, was put into receivership by the Bank of Ireland in February of last year. The receiver:s accounts filed last month in the Companies Office show little prospect of any return for the group of personal and institutional (Development Capital Corporation) interests who took over the business from the Timony family in 1978.

One of the least well known Roche companies, Hydracyl Engineering, has also run into difficulties, with a receiver being appointed by the Northern Bank on the 18th of last month. Hydracyl was set up in 1978 to fill a gap in the hydraulic cylinders market which had been identified by the IDA. The £ 1/4 million investment was assisted by new industry grants of £75,000.

There is reason, too, to doubt that the chemical storage depot at Drogheda will ever be built. It was first proposed two years ago by Murrough Holdings (three-quarters, Tom Roche; one quarter, Paddy Monahan, the Drogheda merchant with whom he first became associated when Roadstone started shipping road-making aggregate from their Slane quarry through Drogheda), and following refusal of planning permission by Drogheda Corporation, the company's appeal was heard last April. A decision was expected from An Bord Pleanala last month but, as Tom Roche, himself acknowledges, it is unlikely to be in their favour.

That proposal followed what Tom Roche calls "a few tentative inquiries". To make them, he would have had to walk about a hundred yards down the road from his home to that of his son in-law, Dan Tierney. Tierney runs the Cross Chemical Group, which even takes its name from the road where the extended Roche family is concentrated. (Tom, junior, lives in the mews behind his parents' home. Michael Wymes lived across the road in the Hermitage until he bought a baronial estate in Co. Meath.) Tierney has also recently started importing molasses into Dublin port where he has the first custom-built molasses storage facility in the country. The Murrough Holdings proposal for Drogheda included two 1127 cubic metre tanks for molasses.

In the late 1960s, Dan Tierney ran the Arrow petrol business from Arklow - the first venture by Tom Roche in to the energy resource business. In 1970, the American corporation Conoco bought them giving the Roches a handsome gain; a .short-lived tilt at the majors had come to an early end. More recently, Tom Roche, has set up a petrol import and distribution company, Ola, with Paddy Monahan as a partner, and with financial backing from the PMP A. This challenge to the majors looks like lasting longer; having benefited already from the state-to-state oil deal worked out between the Irish National Petroleum Corporation and Iraq. Dan Tierney was among the eight directors appointed by Des O'Malley to the board of INPC last year.

Governments of all hues have been good to Tom Roche, The decision to build the dual carriageway from Dublin to Naas launched his back-yard sand and concrete business into the big time, and brought him into association with John A. Wood of Cork, who also had a quarry in Co, Kildare. Thirty years later, the present government's commitment to encouraging private investment in "infrastructural development" (emphasised again last month in a speech by the Taoiseach) has smoothed the path for the toll bridge across the Liffey which Roche first proposed to the Dublin Port and Docks Board while the Coalition was still in power. Last year, a government bill to allow for tolls to be charged on roads and bridges became law. And in August, the Department of Transport approved the application for a Harbour Works Order to build the bridge. The Bridge Order required from the Department of the Environment is likely to be approved, after a public inquiry, within the next six months.

The quest for immortality runs through all of human history and Tom Roche is likely to be building a perpetual monument to himself when, as he hopes, construction starts on the Liffey bridge next year. However, in the objects of the company set up to handle the project, Ringsend Bridge Ltd., the purpose is made to seem selfless and altruistic. At 20 pence per car and £1.20 per heavy vehicle, the company will have some cash to spare after meeting its costs. This is to be devoted to "the relief of poverty, the advancement of education, the advancement of religion and other purposes beneficial to the community not falling under the aforementioned headings but within the definition of charity for income tax purposes."

Tom Roche's income tax returns must already be complicated enough, with his ability to conjure up new companies and new projects. From his one million shares in Cement Roadstone, he nets over £20,000 annually. And that's before directors' fees are paid. He increased his stake from 527 ,000 shortly ,after he relinquished the post of Chief Executive; CRH cites Roche's major share-holding as an indication, that he is still deeply committed to the company in spite of his increasingly diverse outside interests. The full extent of Tom Roche's directorship is nowhere given in the appropriate place in the files lodged at Companies Office. The average number of "other directorships" listed is five - about one quarter of the correct number.

The full list of companies outside the Cement-Roadstone and Bula groups with which Tom Roche is associated includes some which have ceased to be active, but which were in their time the vehicles for ambitious projects. Irish Hydro Carbon Co. Ltd., was set up in 1970 (the threshold year for Tom Roche, when he sold Arrow and merged Roadstone with Cement to help form a monopoly of the kind he has challenged before and since) with Mark Clinton, the Fine Gael TD, and Tom Roche among the Irish directors. The controlling interest was held by the APCO corporation of California.

In 1972, the company announced its proposal to build an oil refinery at Whiddy Island, for which they received planning permission from the Minister for Local Government, Jimmy Tully, after an appeal, in 1974. Two years later, the company was still saying that the project is "not yet dead". Today, it is most affirmatively deceased. National Exploration Ltd. was another of the Roche companies to fall flat. It was set up in 1971 to explore for minerals, held 15 prospecting licences in 1974, but has since surrendered them. The Roches/Wymes/Wood combine has enough minerals on its plate through the purchase of the Wright farm at Navan. Bula has only acquired three further exploration licences, two in Co. Meath and one on the border of counties Monaghan and Louth. But Tom Roche rejects any suggestion that Bula is less than serious about mining. The company will exploit the Navan deposit, he says, if it gets the go-ahead. Unlike most observers he believes Bula acquitted itself well in the marathon planning appeal hearing.

It is likely, however, that a Roche company will be digging below Dublin Bay before it goes underground at Navan. This time, it is Chelston Ltd., the vehicle (though not yet registered as a company) which Roche has chosen for the LPG storage project. Having set up Flogas, he began studying the LPG market, he says, and realised that one of its major problems was the cost of overground storage in pressurised tanks. Underground storage in natural caverns is well established in the United States, while in Sweden, Norway and Finland, caverns have been dug at more than 100 metres below the ground ,specifically for this purpose. The Chelston proposal is for three vaulted caverns 175 metres long, 24 metres high and 15 metres across, with 30 metres separating one cavern from the next. They are to be dug partly under reclaimed land and partly under water to the north and east where Dublin Port and Docks Board intends to carry out a massive reclamation project.

In order to smooth relations with potential users of his storage space, Tom Roche has divested himself of any interest in Flogas, leaving Development Capital Corporation with the major share. Now Calor-Kosangas, who two years ago took Flogas to court on two separate counts, declared itself very positively interested in Roche's project. They have had to add to their storage facilities almost annually but envisage moving some of the tanks now located in Dublin docks to other parts of the country if Chelston digs its holes to give it capacity for an annual throughput of 120,000 tonnes -or almost the equivalent of the whole Irish market at present.

Dublin Corporation planners seem sceptical, posing a long list of detailed questions for additional information although Chelston's application is only for outline permission. "It appears there are only three or four firms in the world with the technology to carry out this kind of construction," says the Corpo. But anybody who can sell a minority stake in a putative mining company to a government for ready tax-free cash, is unlikely to be deterred by such considerations.