New managing director appointed at auctioneers

Diarmuid McMahon has been appointed managing director of Sherry Fitzgerald McMahon in Ennis and is the fourth generation of  the McMahon family in the property business in the county.

His appointment comes at a time of serious challenge in the sector, with the downturn in the global and national economies.
Since Michael McMahon & Son was founded in 1900, marked fluctuations in the property market were overcome by the company, a strong, reassuring factor as Diarmuid takes over the helm.
Michael McMahon, Diarmuid’s great-grandfather, first collected rents on behalf Clare landlords including the absentee Bonardie landlords, for the Conyngham Estate in Kilkee and the Blood Estate in Quin and Corofin.
A founding member of the Irish Auctioneers Association, his business at Bank Place in Ennis was mainly in land sales and he was later joined in the company by his son Gerry. A plan by the IRA during the Civil War to stop him on his return from an auction on the estate of Colonel Henn at Paradise, Ballynacally was foiled when he received a tip-off and rearranged his route home.
An auction room with overhead offices was built by Gerry McMahon on the corner of Parnell Street on O’Connell Square in Ennis, and at least on one occasion, the auction room was cleared out for the annual Ennis rugby club dinner dance. He later acquired the laundry buildings attached to the Ennis Convent of Mercy Orphanage for £17,500.
The head office of Sherry Fitzgerald McMahon is housed in a section of this today while another section is occupied by Ulster Bank. Gerry married Rhoda Honan, daughter of well-known Fianna Fáil senator, TV Honan, who ran a public house across the Square and their son Dermot later joined the business.
Like Diarmuid, Dermot McMahon, became involved in the property business at a difficult time.
In the 1980s, activity in the housing market had completely slowed down as interest rates rose to 18%. An additional factor was the currency crisis that ground trading almost to a halt. Dermot developed a broadly based property advisory business in O’Connell Square, including the First National Building Society, the agency’s third office in the country at that time.
He went on to become president of the Auctioneering and Valuers Institute and Ennis Chamber of Commerce. It took until autumn of 1995 before the economy began to rise with the lowering of interest rates and later the introduction of the euro.
Dermot became the founding chairman of Sherry Fitzgerald Countrywide in 1999 and his firm became its first franchisee.
Diarmuid is a B.Comm graduate from NUIG, received an MBSc from UCD in 1997 and became a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in 2001 following a four year placement at KPMG. He went on to work with BSM, a management and technology consultancy in Galway ,specialising in operational excellence and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) in life sciences and consumer product companies, where his focus was on information technology and computer systems.