Meet the woman leading Ireland’s largest landlord

Ires has become the state’s largest private landlord almost overnight. Its business is rent, and business is good. But not everyone is happy with the way it does things

Margaret Sweeney, chief executive, Ires: ‘I would hope across the range of our portfolio that we can actually service people’ Picture: Fergal Phillips

For several years, when the world looked at places like Sandyford, they saw nothing but the stranded skeletons of building projects left abandoned when the economic tide went out. Half-finished apartment buildings, a mish-mash of steel and glass, developers with loans in Nama: the flotsam that remained on the surface after a ship goes down.

But when a Canadian company called Capreit saw it, an opportunity was glimpsed. In the space of a ...