When Bill McMorrow first arrived in Ireland, it snowed for a week.

Friends told the California-based real estate mogul that the weather in Ireland was inclement at the best of times, but most had said it was never awash with snow. 

“Snow for a week – seriously,” he later told me.

The weather was fitting. 

It was November 2010, and Ireland’s economy was teetering between chaos and calamity. The country was entering a bailout after spooked international markets withdrew their support. Banks were on life support, propped up by a state that needed propping up itself. The property market was collapsing. Insolvencies and unemployment were surging. The Government had lost both domestic and international support.

McMorrow arrived into this dizzying and depressing period of Irish life to see how bad things were. 

The owner of Kennedy Wilson, a property investment firm, had long believed that the best opportunities lay in a crisis. And Ireland was in a real crisis.

So, working his way through the snow, he took 25 meetings in a week. He sat with Government officials, coffeed with prominent businesspeople, and knuckled down with lawyers. 

By the time he was finished, he had come to a remarkable conclusion – it was time to invest in Ireland.  

“The mood was so negative,” he told me in 2013. “But it convinced me there was a major opportunity.”

Ireland’s economic collapse had opened up a lucrative landscape for investors. An unprecedented volume of property flooded the market, driving prices sharply downward. Having built his fortune in the wake of Japan’s 1990s crash, McMorrow recognised the scale of the opportunity emerging in Ireland and moved to seize it.

“It’s the famous thing that Sir John Templeton said: ‘Whenever there is maximum pessimism, that’s when you really want to be investing’,” he told me during a lengthy interview in his California office for a documentary I was making on the influx of foreign capital into post-crash Ireland.

McMorrow was an outlier in his belief in Ireland at that time. The private equity giants and the vulture funds that feasted on Ireland’s economic collapse were years away from investing in the country. Instead, it was a small number of individuals and companies who saw the possibilities, like the Comer brothers, who bought large swathes of real estate or the investment fund Franklin Templeton, which bought a massive amount of Irish bonds.

There is a saying in business: pioneers get shot, and settlers make money. These were all pioneers, and yet they all made money. 

At the time, however, few people saw the opportunity. And most laughed at those who suspected that there was one.

“That time I told everyone we were planning on making a big push into Ireland, I got absolutely scorned about what a stupid idea it was,” McMorrow recalled. 

But the way he saw it, if everybody told him it was a stupid idea, it was “a good time to do it”.

And that is exactly what he and his firm, Kennedy Wilson, did. They bought a vast amount of Irish assets – apartments, hotels, land banks, commercial property, retail assets. 

It even played a big role in keeping Bank of Ireland safe from nationalisation. It was part of a consortium of five US and Canadian firms that made a combined €1.1 billion investment in Bank of Ireland in the summer of 2011.

It exited the bank, but it kept buying and adding to its Irish portfolio. It now has more than 3,500 apartments on its books, for example.

It was not there to buy and flip. Instead, it proved to be a long-term investor, and has become one of the country’s largest landlords. 

“There is a saying in real estate that you should never fall in love with what you own. But I had a personal reason for making sure that everything went well in Ireland,” McMorrow told me, explaining his ancestors came from this country and how that mattered deeply to him.

Yet, it was not genealogy that prompted him to pump hundreds of millions of euro into a country that was on financial life support. He looked at the fundamentals and determined they were sound.

And it worked out beautifully for McMorrow and Kennedy Wilson. As Thomas outlined in a three-part series on the firm in 2023, it has been the most active property investor in Ireland for the past decade, with around €1 billion on its investments here and generating €100 million in net rental income.

It has made some sales, such as offloading the Shelbourne Hotel in 2024 at a significant premium. But it has remained true to McMorrow’s promise back at the time of the crash – it was not here to make a fast buck. 

When I met McMorrow, we sat down in his Beverly Hills office. There was a surfboard in one corner, but tellingly, a framed Leinster jersey on the wall (sponsored by Bank of Ireland) with his name and a green tie draped over it. Ireland meant something to him. 

We owe something to people like Bill McMorrow, individuals who helped an ailing state when even vulture funds were afraid to fly here. 

As Thomas has reported on before, Kennedy Wilson’s structure is complex, and much of it has been listed on public markets. Over the years, there have been public spats with the likes of George Soros over its direction. 

Yet, McMorrow has remained at the helm. Last week, however, it was announced that the company will be effectively taken private by McMorrow and Fairfax Financial for about €1.27 billion.

The consortium will acquire all remaining shares ⁠for $10.90 each in cash, a heightened offer ‌from a ​previous $10.25 in November.

Once the deal closes, Canadian billionaire Prem Watsa’s Fairfax, another significant player in the Bank of Ireland story, will have a majority economic ‌interest in ⁠Kennedy Wilson, while the CEO-led KW Management Group will retain operational control.

Ireland will remain central to the company. As of 30 September, its Irish investments were valued at $488.6 million, supported by $215.7 million in mortgage debt. According to its third-quarter results, Ireland accounted for roughly 20 per cent of Kennedy Wilson’s annual net operating income of $434 million.

It is a long way from that week of snow in November 2010 to a €1.27 billion take-private deal 15 years later. Yet there is a straight line between the two. When others saw only frostbite, McMorrow saw foundations. When markets recoiled, he leaned in. 

Elsewhere last week…

Alice has been reporting on the Port of Cork for some time. Last week, she published a major investigation into a deal no one could explain – and the Port of Cork couldn’t control.

In 2023, the commercial team at the port thought it had hit upon a new idea to generate revenue. Instead, it discovered a poorly documented deal that may have been costing the port hundreds of thousands a year for at least 15 years.

Allstate Sales Group collapsed and its CEO faces serious fraud charges in the US, entangled with the company’s bungled Irish expansion and its hiring drive that never got going. Jonathan had the story.

Kerry Group failed to sparkle in 2025 as it regrouped following the sale of its legacy Irish dairy processing, introduced a more aggressive digital transformation programme, and faced a geopolitical challenge different from tariffs. Thomas assessed its results.

For decades, Washington defended the greenback in word if not always in deed. Now, with Trump abandoning the script and investors scrambling to hedge, the USD’s overvaluation is being exposed – and Asia looks set to drive the next wave lower. Peter looked at the issue in his column.