DUBLIN

IN the green borderlands of County Fermanagh, there was nothing like the Mighty Quinn.

That is what they called Sean Quinn — canny conglomerateur to his friends, wily rogue to his enemies and, until recently, the richest man in Ireland.

Even now, with times so hard in this country, his up-by-the-bootstraps story is the stuff of legend, a Celtic fairy tale for strivers and climbers. This, after all, is the farmer’s son who became a quarry man and then, with gravel and grit and yes, a bit of old-fashioned greed, became a billionaire.

Until, that is, it all came crashing down.

Mr. Quinn, 65, contends he lost nearly everything when the bottom fell out of the Irish economy. His business empire, his concrete factories, his wind farms and hotels, the helicopter and the Falcon jet — all gone. Last November, after apparently gambling away his fortune on disastrous investments, he was declared bankrupt by a court in Belfast. During the proceedings, he said he was down to his last 11,000 euros, and an aging Mercedes and 166 acres of land.

That, anyway, is what Mr. Quinn says. Here in Dublin, at the financial institution formerly known as the Anglo Irish Bank, Mr. Quinn’s skeptical bankers say his assertions are, well, blarney. They suspect that he and his family still secretly control valuable assets as varied as a shopping tower in Ukraine and real estate in Hyderabad, India’s Silicon Valley.