Ben Dunne: The low-cost crusader who believed ‘in business it helps if you have an enemy’

When I first met Ben Dunne as he burst through the door of the green room behind the scenes of an ill-fated television programme we both worked on almost 16 years ago, such was his instantly recognisable and almost cartoonish presence it was as if a fictional character had come to life.

The programme, called Highly Recommended, had a premise which saw a panel of judges - including myself and Dunne - pitched money saving ideas. If an idea won our approval, the contestant went home with €1,000.

It was like Dragon’s Den for penny pinchers.

My fellow judge was always affable behind the scenes, but more so before the cameras. A contestant’s notion had to be truly terrible for him not to give it the thumbs up, and at all times he was playing to the gallery. While he feigned tough talking in the early discussions about the ideas brought to the table, he loved nothing more than giving a money saving plan the green light to the cheers of the studio audience.

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The six-part series was filmed over the course of few days, and on one of those days he gave me a lift home. His car was a beast of a machine, and his driver was a former high-ranking garda employed with the memories of Dunne’s kidnapping at the hands of the IRA more than two decades earlier never far from front of mind.

While we snaked through rush-hour traffic, heading from the makeshift studio in Swords to the city centre where I was to be decanted, allowing him to drive on to his home in Castleknock, he dispensed pearls of sometimes hilarious retail wisdom.

Back then, the Ben Dunne gyms were in the ascendancy and those radio ads in which he growled “take that, Jackie Skelly” were on maximum rotation. I asked him why he had decided to even mention a rival gym owner who most people would never have heard of, and what he had against her?

He looked at me like a school teacher might look at a tiresome student. “I have nothing against Jackie Skelly at all. I don’t even really know her, but in business, it helps if you have an enemy and if you don’t actually have an enemy, you just make one up and then go after them.”

[ Ben Dunne: Businessman and kidnap victim, ousted from Dunnes after payments to politicians, dies at 74 ]

[ Ben Dunne: Without Florida arrest, would underbelly of business and political life in Ireland have been revealed? ]

After the Jackie Skelly gyms disappeared from the fitness landscape - perhaps in no small part to the “take that, Jackie Skellys” that came from Dunne - he turned his tirades against FlyFit. In more recent ads could be heard railing against them with an enthusiastic rage that - you’d have to imagine - was equally fictitious.

After the TV programme aired, to not a great deal of critical acclaim, I spoke to Dunne on the many occasions I had stories to write about the retail landscape and where we might be heading.

He always very chatty - although suspicious and prickly when talking about issues such as the refusal of Dunnes Stores to recognise unions - and always keen to share his knowledge and understanding of the retail world.

That knowledge ran deep and even after the well-documented rift with his siblings which saw him leave the retail giant decades earlier, it was clear he retained a passion for the family business and had total recall of every triumph and every slight.

He once told me how his father - also Ben - used to drive up to Dublin from his home in Cork every Saturday after he had opened Ireland’s first out-of-town supermarket, at Cornelscourt in south Dublin in 1966. He would park outside the entrance to marvel at the numbers going through the doors in search of the better value that he claimed beat them all.

While Ben snr started the business, Ben jnr grew it with relentless zeal. In almost every conversation we ever had, he talked first and foremost about prices. “The 1960s and 1970s were great for consumers but even better for us,” he once told me. “We were able to undercut the bejaysus out of our rivals. They could never match our prices. When I took over, I was a very aggressive retailer.”

Aggressive is the only word for it.

He was the architect of Ireland’s bread-and-butter wars of the early 1980s. It all started when he found bakers who could bake him a loaf for 19p so he could sell it for 29p, well below the 55p that branded products cost. “Then [government minister] Ray Burke rang me and told me to stop selling cheap bread because I was killing the country’s bakeries. He wanted us to prop up inefficient producers.” That perceived affront still rankled when he told me about it a full 30 years later.

The bread wars ultimately led to the Grocery Order, which prohibited below-cost selling and was - at least in part - responsible for the higher than necessary prices paid by Irish consumers for generations.

While he left Dunnes Stores, it never really left him. There will be much written about his kidnapping, the payments to politicians and the cocaine-induced panic attack in that Florida hotel, but despite it all he was always a salesman. It was what he was born to do.

And he was absolutely ruthless.

On more than one occasion he used to marvel at how the German discounters Aldi and Lidl had been allowed to establish a presence in the Republic. He admired their laser sharp focus on the 80/20 rule of retailing: 80 per cent of sales come from 20 per cent of the products. “They stock the basics and cut the daylights out of them,” he observed.

He was also of the view that, had he remained in charge of the family business, the Germans would never have got a foothold in Ireland. “I would never have let them get a look in,” he said. “I would have driven them out before they got started.”

It was easy to believe that was true.