Ben Dunne: Businessman, media personality, industry disruptor
Ben Dunne — businessman, media personality, industry disruptor — has died in Dubai, aged 74.
Survived by his wife Mary and four children, his passing marks the sudden end of a remarkable life, one that played out in equal parts parable, soap opera, and Greek tragedy. How else to describe an innings that involved a kidnapping at the hands of the IRA, an irreversible family fracture precipitated by a vice case, and his almost perpetual personal reinvention? He died while on holiday with his family in Dubai and his death marks the end of a colourful and intriguing life lived mostly in the spotlight in the small fishbowl of Irish public life.
Born the youngest of six children in 1949 and growing up in Cork's Ringmahon House, Dunne left school early to join the family business Dunnes Stores, which was founded by his father, Ben Dunne Snr, in Cork in 1944. What started off as a single drapery shop on Patrick's Street has grown to become a business that employs 15,000 people in over 130 stores across Ireland, the UK, and Spain.
Ben Dunne shakes hands with Brian Lenihan while Fianna Fáil Leader Charles Haughey looks on in 1986.Working under his father, he helped oversee a revolution in Irish retail, which included the introduction of own-brand clothing, and out-of-town shopping centres. Despite his father's obsessively private nature and devotion to keeping business in the family, Dunne Jr became an increasingly public figure in the late seventies and early eighties, developing a profile that resulted in a targeted kidnapping by the IRA in October 1981. Abducted from his car just north of the border while driving to Newry for business, Dunne was held captive for a week. While gardaí and sources close to the family insisted no ransom money changed hands to ensure his release, reports at the time suggested a sum close to £1.5 million had been paid. Years later, property developer and publican Patrick Gallagher — a friend of Dunne’s — claimed he provided the ransom money at the direction of Taoiseach-in-waiting Charles Haughey, though this was never proven.
Speaking subsequently of the ordeal, Mr Dunne insisted he knew nothing of how he came to be released, quipping — in his typical gregarious manner — that he was not worth the amount suggested. The kidnapping dominated national news, and in doing so foretold many news cycles to come.
A matter of days after his release, Dunne famously returned to work. After his father's death in 1983, the matter of who would succeed him was again the subject of national interest and intrigue. With the Dunnes Stores board consisting only of his mother Norah and five siblings, a two-horse race for the leadership of the company ensued between Ben and his sister, Margaret Heffernen. The youngest son emerged victorious. If his father’s desire was to keep his family’s personal business private, his successor seemed intent on making as many headlines as he was selling shirts, embracing his new leadership role with a gusto unfamiliar to an Irish economy still wide-eyed and innocent in its early adolescence.
Such was Dunne’s status as a commercial and media personality in Ireland over the next decade, the events and subsequent fallout of the night of February 18, 1992, would be enough to fill an entire boxset of RTÉ’s Reeling in the Years.
While on a golfing holiday in Florida with business acquaintances and friends, Dunne, holed up in a $2000-a-night suite on the 17th floor of the Cypress Hyatt in Orlando, was arrested for cocaine possession and solicitation of a sex worker. The episode became a national scandal.
In a turn that appalled the PR people of early nineties Ireland, Dunne chose multiple public mea culpas rather than escaping to a metaphorical cabin in the woods. With charges hanging over him in the US, he spoke to every Irish newspaper he could, expressing unequivocal remorse and shame, before checking into an exclusive London rehab centre for treatment.
As a country, we had a few years to go before the Celtic Tiger.
The national conversation at the time was dominated by contraception and divorce. Of all the scandals Ireland was becoming used to, coke and prostitution in a Florida hotel room was something beyond new
Even in shocking us, Dunne was ahead of his time. Despite the outrage, he won many admirers. Of his willingness to be so publicly vulnerable in the face of national disgrace, Patricia Redlich wrote at the time “his confession may, however, start a process of change".
His contrition was enough to save his marriage, but there was no amount of public flagellation that could save him from the judgement of his nuclear family. Within a year, Dunne was replaced as executive chairperson of Dunnes Stores by his brother Frank. It was the first step in an unseemly sequence of events that could have been straight out of a season of Succession.
Amidst high court proceedings taken against his own siblings, rumours swirled of payments made by Dunne to Charlie Haughey. These revelations — eventually brought into the public domain through legal confidential affidavits prepared by Dunnes team for the high court battle — paved the way for the McCracken tribunal.
Margaret Heffernan, sister of Ben Dunne.After a very public struggle for power, his sister Margaret wrested control of the company. Despite being instrumental in building Ireland’s first $1bn retail company, Dunne was exiled, albeit £100m richer.
It was during that McCracken Tribunal, however, that his reputation was further tarnished, concluding as it did that Dunne had knowingly assisted Michael Lowry in evading his tax obligations. In 2011, the Moriarity Tribunal was even more damaging in its summary of Dunne’s influence. Such reputational damage would finish other men, Dunne seemed emboldened.
There followed a series of reinventions — not all of them successful — before Dunne rediscovered his purpose through his chain of fitness centres, Ben Dunne Gyms. By putting his name front and centre and lending his voice to the radio advertising campaign, Dunne somehow remained ubiquitous in Irish life. For a younger generation unaware of his role in building Dunnes Stores, he became the guy on the radio ad. His willingness to diversify his interests, as well as publicly endorsing his own product, was indicative of the entrepreneur he had proven himself to be — unafraid, unabashed, and very self-aware.
And so, in his passing, people will reflect on a man who often flew too close to the sun, but always gathered enough feathers to have another go. Ben Dunne was much more than a disruptor in the business sense, he messed with our moral compasses, too. He could shock and inspire. He was capable of playing both victim and delinquent. A kidnapping would define most men's lives. For him, it was just another chapter in a remarkable story that was never, ever dull.
His name, the near alliteration of it, will linger long after his death. It is over thirty years since he left his family’s company, yet you cannot buy a simple pair of socks there without thinking of him. Even in his untimely passing, halfway around the world, he seems somehow larger than the remarkable life he so fully — and controversially — lived.
