Flinn, Hugo (Hugh) (1922–2010), businessman, was born in Rushbrooke, Cobh, Co. Cork, on 11 June 1922, the eldest of two sons of Hugo Victor Flinn (qv), of Rushbrooke, and his wife Monica (née Wilson). His father was an engineer, businessman and Fianna Fáil TD for Cork Borough, serving as parliamentary secretary to the minister for finance (1932–43) and turf controller (1940–43). Educated at CBC Cork and UCC, Hugo junior broke the Irish schoolboys' record for putting the 12-lb. weight in 1940, and played rugby for both his secondary school and university college. After graduating with a degree in civil engineering in 1944, he worked as an engineer in land drainage.
Having inherited £10,000 from their father, Hugo and his younger brother Donal (1923–2004) set up a public works contracting company in 1948 called H & D Flinn. Hugo was the managing director and 75 per cent owner while Donal concentrated on his successful accounting career. In 1952 Hugo married Vivienne Hanley of Rathgar, Dublin. They had three sons and two daughters, and lived initially in Athlone, Co. Westmeath, where Hugo lined out for the local rugby team. Renamed Public Works Limited in the early 1960s, his company specialised in earthmoving, and expanded into Northern Ireland and Britain in the early 1970s, eventually employing over 200 workers. He also farmed 90 acres in Co. Offaly and was active for a time in the National Farmers' Association. Friendly with leading Fianna Fáil politicians, he was appointed a director of Bord na Mona in 1964.
In 1972 he was prominent in the creation of the Northern Ireland Freedom and Justice Campaign, an anti-internment group also established to refute what it termed British propaganda about developments in Northern Ireland. Yet Flinn's ardent nationalism was tempered by his religious principles, and soon afterwards he founded and became chairman of Conciliation Ireland, which sought to negotiate an end to the hostilities in the north. For this purpose, he met members of the Orange order, including Ian Paisley (qv), and recruited workers for his company from loyalist areas in Northern Ireland.
With the British and Irish economies sliding into a recession, he joined an Irish government trade mission to Libya in 1974 and won a £6 million contract on an irrigation scheme. He then set his sights on Nigeria, which was experiencing an oil boom, and moved there in 1975. The challenges associated with penetrating such an unruly market obliged him to transfer a majority stake in his Nigerian company to indigenous investors after which he began to pick up contracts for road works. However, the early losses incurred in Nigeria, along with the long delays occurring on the Kielder Dam project in Northumberland, England, pushed Flinn's contracting group towards crisis.
Though Flinn secured advances in July 1978 of £400,000 from Irish businessman Tom Roche (qv) and of £300,000 from his brother Donal, his attempts to negotiate a comprehensive rescue package with financial institutions were truncated when Roche put Public Works into receivership that November. It emerged that during 1976–7 large quantities of plant and machinery had been quietly shipped from Public Works in Ireland to its Nigerian associate, which was unaffected by the receivership. The transfers reportedly yielded £1 million in profits for a Swiss intermediary company established by the Flinns for this purpose. As the Flinns' loans to Public Works were secured on all assets, they were better placed than many other creditors, and one such, Hodge Finance, initiated legal action in 1980, claiming that assets securing its loan had been fraudulently moved to Nigeria.
The matter did not go to court, but the questionable manoeuvres attending Public Works's demise aroused disquiet in Irish financial circles and may have forced Donal Flinn's premature retirement in 1982 as managing partner of the Coopers & Lybrand accounting firm. Upon its liquidation in 1985 with realisable assets of £135,000 and debts of £4.7 million (including £455,000 owed to Hugo Flinn and £51,000 owed to Donal Flinn), Public Works was owed £3.14 million from Public Works (Nigeria), half of which was in respect of transfers of plant and machinery. Hugo Flinn asserted that the Nigerian company, despite its ongoing receipt of large contracts, was barely surviving due to difficulties in getting paid amid political and economic turmoil in Nigeria from 1979.
Under his continued management, Public Works (Nigeria) grew in obscure circumstances during the early 1990s into one of Nigeria's largest contractors. Hugo Flinn regained formal control of the company, which he owned latterly with two other Irish investors. By 2010 his concern, then called the PW Group, employed 4,000 workers, had expanded into Ghana and Tanzania, boasted annual revenues of $180 million, and specialised in civil engineering, construction and mining. A noted philanthropist, Flinn befriended and assisted missionaries and development workers, and involved the PW Group in building schools, hospitals and churches, and also in installing the infrastructure for the papal mass at Abuja in 1997; he met Pope John Paul II during his visit to the country. As a fervent catholic and vocal opponent of legalising abortion, Flinn was shaken by the exposure in the 1990s of the church's role in enabling paedophile sex criminals.
Publicly praising the Nigerian military regime for restoring a semblance of order after a chaotic period of civilian rule in the early 1980s, Flinn defended its much criticised human rights record and the internationally condemned execution of environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995. He was particularly close to one of the country's most significant and notorious power brokers, David Mark, who in 1989 contracted the PW Group to develop and manage the St Margaret's golf course in north Co. Dublin. In 1993 Flinn and Mark combined to undertake the £10 million development of the Druids Glen golf course in Co. Wicklow. The eventual publicity surrounding these investments aroused anger in Nigeria, where Mark was regarded as one of the worst exemplars of a spectacularly corrupt political elite.
Mark spent 1994–8 exiled in Britain, during which tensions developed between him and Flinn, who remained in good odour with the Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha. In 1997 Flinn sued Mark in the Irish high court for payment of £567,000 relating to the development of St Margaret's golf club. Mark paid the debt, but counter-sued for negligence and excessive costs after the St Margaret's golf development cost £5.2 million instead of the £1.8 million initially projected. In 1998 the legal battle moved to the British courts where Flinn sued Mark for £1.3 million and a 25 per cent share of St Margaret's. Mark's return to influence in Nigeria that year led to a cessation of hostilities, with Mark retaining uncontested ownership of St Margaret's and the PW Group emerging as the sole proprietor of Druids Glen.
Maintaining an Irish residence in Greystones, Co. Wicklow, Flinn corresponded regularly with Irish newspapers on topical issues and in doing so decried the compromises made with unionist interests as part of the Northern Ireland peace process. He was most known in Ireland as the developer and principal of Druids Glen, sparing no expense on a design that incorporated a suspension bridge longer than O'Connell Bridge and a spectacular series of waterfalls dominating the approach to the 18th hole. Opening in 1995 and marketed at elite and corporate clients, the parkland course hosted the Irish Open for four years running from 1996, and has been described as Ireland's version of Augusta National.
Flinn also oversaw the much praised redevelopment of a period mansion, Woodstock House, into the course clubhouse, which he furnished with specially commissioned portraits of leading Irish nationalists and a prominently displayed, engraved copy of the 1916 proclamation. (Following his death, these nationalist emblems were removed as part of the club's attempts to attract visitors from Britain and Northern Ireland.) In the 2000s he developed a second golf course, Druids Heath, on the 400-acre site, as well as a 150-bedroom hotel, a spa and leisure centre, forty apartments and sixteen townhouses. The resort employed 200 workers and incurred acceptable losses given the unsustainable proliferation of status-proclaiming golf developments across Ireland.
After Hugo Flinn's retirement, his son Donal succeeded as chief executive of the PW Group. Hugo died in his Greystones residence on 15 April 2010 and was buried nearby in Redford cemetery.
His brother Donal was president of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland for 1976/7 and, after developing Coopers & Lybrand into one of Ireland's most successful accounting firms, received a number of prestigious corporate directorships. He also served as chairman (1983–5) of the ailing Irish Press newspaper group before being forced out by the de Valera family. Despite his longstanding associations with assorted Fianna Fáil luminaries, he assisted the foundation of the Progressive Democrats in 1985, continuing for some years as a leading party fundraiser and chairman of one of its largest branches.