Sean Quinn & Family

Serial Irish border entrepreneur Sean Quinn, and his family, join Ireland's elite sterling billionaire ranks, having built the Quinn Group from scratch over the past thirty-four years into a huge conglomerate.

A farmer's son, Quinn left school at fifteen to work on his family's twenty-three acre dairy farm in Derrylin, Co. Fermanagh. His breakthrough came in 1973, when at the age of twenty-six he realised the family was sitting on huge reserves of sand, gravel and shale. Buying a truck for £600 and borrowing money for a mechanical shovel, Quinn went into the quarrying business. One half of the quarry was in Northern Ireland and the other half in the Republic. The Troubles in the North meant a healthy demand for building products in construction and repair work. In 1975, Quinn started making concrete blocks, he followed that with cement, and in the early 1980s with roof and floor tiles.

By the mid 1980s, the Quinn Group had become Ireland's second largest cement manufacturer. Quinn diversified and bought nine Dublin pubs and a string of Irish hotels in the mid 1990s. The Irish property boom that followed increased their value six-fold. Quinn-direct Insurance, which now writes premiums of £350m a year, has also taken him into a new and lucrative market.

In 2006, the Quinn Group made £264m profit on £1 bn. The family has amassed over £600m in assets, including building a 5%, £368m stake in Anglo Irish, a quoted Dublin business bank, hotels, wind farms, pubs and other investments.

Quinn has given much of the company to his five children Brenda, Ciara, Sean Junior, Colette and Aoife- three of whom work for it. Right now we value the Quinn Group and the other assets at around £3bn, adding another £50m for other assets.