It was as intoxicating as success gets. The scene was the penthouse suite of the Radisson hotel in Galway, its opulent interior crammed with tycoons, politicians and old friends up from Clare. The wraparound windows looked down on a city en fete for the Galway Races.
In a nearby room, Bertie Ahern, then the taoiseach, was on the phone to George Bush, then the US president, discussing how to accelerate the IRA's move towards decommissioning.
As the party spirits down the corridor escalated, so did the jokes about the Oval Office and the hot line to the most powerful man in the world.
For Bernard McNamara, the joint host with his development partner Jerry O'Reilly, the mixture of power, influence and success must have been the ultimate buzz. Six years on, the dream lies shattered.
LAST Wednesday was McNamara's 60th birthday. His horoscope warned him he faced an important issue but that people have short memories and would forget past favours.
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That morning he instructed lawyers to abandon plans for a Supreme Court appeal against a judgment requiring him to pay 62.5m to a consortium of wealthy individuals who had backed his planned development of the former Irish Glass Bottle site in the Poolbeg peninsula in Dublin.
McNamara's purchase of these 25 acres in 2006 for 412m had boosted the self-satisfaction of a country already high on its unprecedented purchasing power. The only sour note came from commentators who questioned the decision by the state-owned Dublin Docklands Development Authority (DDDA) to invest 107m in a deal in which it was also the statutory licensing body.
Today, the fields earmarked for 1,250 family-sized apartments, 1m sq ft of offices and 3,500 permanent jobs to administer it all, are valued at less than 60m. The promotion brochures hailed it as "the ultimate city seaside development". Now it is headed for the deep-freeze called the National Asset Management Agency (Nama), along with the Shelbourne hotel, "Dublin's finest address", which McNamara bought with five other investors for 140m in 2004 before spending 110m on its refurbishment.
McNamara, a two-term Fianna Fail county councillor from Lisdoonvarna, Co Clare, has been in talks with Nama since late last year. He has debts of around 1.5 billion and no unsecured assets, apart from a modest house in Clare.
After 40 years of hard slog (he was customarily at his desk by 7.30am) spent building up an audacious empire, his life has come to an abrupt halt. Come tomorrow morning, nobody is quite sure where he will go to work or even if he will, as he has resigned as executive chairman of his construction company, Michael McNamara.
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Two days before Christmas 2008, he and his wife, Moira, remortgaged the palatial family home he built on the site of the old Japanese embassy in Ailesbury Road, Dublin, with its famous basement swimming pool and mobile ballroom floor.
As the grantee was Anglo Irish bank, the house, described by one visitor as "fabulous but tasteful", seems destined for possession by the state. He told one well-wisher who commiserated with him after the house of cards finally collapsed on Wednesday: "If I have to move to a campsite down in Doolin, I can live there."
Nama awaits most of McNamara's other acquisitions once the new agency's personnel have completed their evaluations. These include the 400m Elm Park development near the Merrion Gates in south Dublin (accommodating 28,000 sq m of offices, a hotel and a hospital) which McNamara developed with O'Reilly, his Killarney-born partner in the 65m Galway Radisson, and which was built by Michael McNamara.
The shell of the new hospital strikes a forlorn metaphor for Ireland's economic crash. McNamara had banked on the National Maternity Hospital (NMH) moving there from its antiquated premises in Holles Street, following a formal resolution by the board that its long-term strategy was to relocate to the Elm Park district of south Dublin.
That plan was dashed when the NMH put its relocation plan on ice and embarked instead on a 15m extension to its existing premises. McNamara's hospital has not even been fitted out.
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Also likely to be included in the Nama package is the nearby Tara Towers hotel, which the developer once planned to raise to double the height of Liberty Hall. There is also a collection of buildings behind the Westbury Hotel where he had planned to create a shopping precinct close to Grafton Street.
He bought the Allianz building beside the Burlington hotel for 100m and Carrisbrook House in Ballsbridge for 47m. Among his other purchases were a chunk of the Champion Sports chain and a substantial block of Sir John Rogerson's Quay, acquired in May 2008 with Derek Quinlan, an investment adviser who now resides in Switzerland.
McNamara acquired a 45% stake in the Conrad hotel opposite the National Concert Hall on Dublin's Earlsfort Terrace. He became the owner of the Ormonde hotel in Kilkenny and, with other investors, bought the Montrose hotel near UCD, for 40m in 2006. It was closed in the first week of January for three months for renovation work, with 80 staff laid off.
Neither Ahern's favourite holiday retreat, the Parknasilla hotel in south Kerry (bought from the Dublin Airport Authority for 40m in 2006, with another 35m spent upgrading it), nor the Burlington hotel in Dublin 4 (acquired for 288 million in 2007) are Nama-bound because the financing was provided by non-Irish, and, therefore, non-Nama banks. The two hotels are, however, likely to end up in the hands of their lenders.
One of the most glamorous deals involving McNamara was the 450m purchase in 2005 by the Select Retail Holdings consortium of the 21-branch Superquinn supermarket chain. Though he sold his 14.5% stake before ordinary mortals realised that economic doomsday was coming, the proceeds of the sale were gobbled up by McNamara's other investments.
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It seems like only yesterday that the McNamara name was as ubiquitous as cranes on the Celtic tiger landscape. The building company he inherited from his father, Michael, was mopping up contracts for Trinity College, the Hermitage clinic, the Gaiety centre, a mixed development, the Point village, a commercial development, and the Lansdowne Road and Donnybrook sports stadiums.
The company's share of state contracts was phenomenal, culminating in the award of the 400m Thornton Hall prison complex and a clean sweep of all five public-private partnerships (PPPs) with Dublin city council for housing regeneration.
It was the abrupt termination of those contracts, to the dismay of the residents of the partly demolished estates, that first signalled that something was rotten in the state of Denmark.
McNamara built the extensions to Leinster House and Dublin airport, the millennium wing of the National Gallery of Ireland, the Ballymun social welfare offices and garda station and the new headquarters for Clare county council in Ennis.
Meanwhile, he emerged as one of the main landlords to the state, collecting nearly 5m a year in rent from the Department of Justice and from Tourism Ireland, where his wife Moira, a former nurse and a director of the Mercer accommodation group, is a member of the board.
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McNamara did not exactly rise from rags. As a business student in Dublin in the late 1960s, his digs were a period house in Raglan Road, Ballsbridge, owned by his father.
Having served as a Fianna Fail councillor for two terms from the age of 23, he stood unsuccessfully for the Dail elections in 1981. Three years later, he upped sticks and moved to Dublin, setting up his family home in Mount Merrion.
Within 24 months, he had his first sizeable contract: the construction of RTE's sports and social club on its campus in Donnybrook. It was soon followed by an extension to Galway hospital.
He built his success on a reputation for high construction standards and a quality finish, and is said to have been influenced by Shelley McNamara, his architect sister and the first of her profession to be admitted to Aosdana. Her husband Michael Kane, is an artist. Yvonne Farrell, her partner at Grafton Architects, was appointed to the board of the DDDA by John Gormley, the environment minister.
McNamara has served his time on state boards too. He was a director of Great Southern Hotels from 1991 to 1995, and of the National Roads Authority from 1998 to 2004, and was appointed a governor of the National Gallery by John O'Donoghue, the former arts minister, in 2003.
DESPITE his voracious empire-building, the amiable, bespectacled father-of-five kept a relatively low profile. He eschewed foreign travel in his leisure time, preferring to holiday in Clare where he occasionally played golf off a 22 handicap.
He made occasional, uncharacteristic forays into the mainstream headlines when his helicopter landings beside Booterstown marsh enraged conservationists and when he appeared alongside Ahern when he was the taoiseach, at the formal announcement of the O'Devaney Gardens regeneration project.
He was generous to charities, acting as a patron of the Special Olympics, providing water in Sudan and schools in India. He wanted to build affordable housing, but having bought 100 acres near Marlay Park in Dublin for that purpose, he failed to acquire planning permission.
A low social profile was never going to keep his name out of the media and, as the economic implosion cornered him in a pincer movement, myths circulated that he had had his legs broken by an angry creditor and had fled into tax exile. Neither was true.
On the contrary, his building company was left to shoulder 10m in bad debts last year and he claims to have paid 42m in tax between 2003 and 2006.
Friends say he is coping with his plight, though baffled at what he sees as Davy investors' shooting themselves in the foot by acquiring a 62.5m court judgment against him which he cannot pay.
He has often averred that he was never interested in the money and this may be just as well because he will effectively be working for Nama from now on. As he said on Wednesday on RTE's Drivetime: "All I can do is my level best to behave with decency and dignity in the situation I'm in."