LIAM O’DWYER and his brother Des have become the latest Dublin pub-owners to end up at the mercy of the courts.
The news that four of their bars have entered interim examinership and three other enterprises, including two hotels, have gone into provisional liquidation has cast the future of some of the city’s best-known pubs into serious doubt.
Originally from Stillorgan, the O’Dwyer brothers were exposed to the pub trade from an early age. Their father and uncles were both pub-owners, and the two brothers helped out in the businesses as teenagers.
In the early 1980s, Liam refurbished his uncle’s pub, O’Dwyers, in Mount Street. In 1989, he bought Sinnots in Dublin city centre. Thus began the process of expanding one of Dublin’s biggest pub groups.
Throughout the 1990s, at the same time as Thomas Read Group founder Hugh O’Regan was adding to his portfolio of pubs, the O’Dwyers were amassing a string of bars across the city.
Bad Bob’s, Howl at the Moon, the George, The Dragon, and later Zanzibar and Cafe en Seine were some of the group’s best-known establishments.
In 1999, the O’Dwyers went head to head with O’Regan in a takeover bid for the Break for the Border Group. The O’Dwyers won the battle. Break for the Border and the O’Dwyers’ pubs merged, and the new listed company was called Capital Holdings. The O’Dwyer brothers held 45 per cent of the company. In 2001 they bought it outright, and the company went private.
Capital Holdings is credited with establishing the city’s first “super-pubs”, mammoth premises which opened late and offered revellers an alternative to nightclubs. Often lavishly furnished at high cost, they tapped in to the zeitgeist of the emerging Celtic Tiger.
Zanzibar and Cafe en Seine, the best-known exemplars of the super-pub, each had a capacity of 1,700. More recently Cafe en Seine gained a reputation for premium pricing. From 2003, the O’Dwyers began to change direction, moving away from pubs towards the hotel trade. It off-loaded various pubs including Dandelion and Bad Bob’s which it sold for €12 million in 2006. Changing consumer habits, and the effect of the smoking ban, were cited as some of the reasons for the change in focus.
It was also at this time that the company came in for criticism about the rates it paid its staff. The issue ended up in the Labour Court, but the judge ruled in O’Dwyer’s favour.
At the same time Capital concentrated its effort on developing its hotel interests, believing that there was a gap in the market for three-star hotels. It doubled the size of the Trinity Capital Hotel on Pearse Street.
More recently it embarked on a more ambitious €100 million hotel project in Abbey Street. Through a newly-formed property company, Deepdrill Developments, Liam and Des O’Dwyer were awarded planning permission to develop a 300-bed hotel at the back of Zanzibar on condition that they also build a Dublin Bus interchange on the site. The hotel was intended to open in 2010.
This venture brought the O’Dwyers into contact with developer Liam Carroll, whose company Danninger opposed the granting of the contract to build the interchange to Deepdrill in the High Court. He lost the case.
Earlier this year, the O’Dwyers and Carroll locked horns again in the High Court – this time, with the O’Dwyers’ lawyers calling for the liquidation of a Carroll company which, it claimed, owed it money.
According to the most recent accounts for Capital’s holding company, Toji Holdings Capital Holdings, the company had accumulated losses of €10.4 million at the end of September 2008.
