Mr Enda Mullin will open the doors of the Westin Dublin on College Green this summer. It is every hotelier's dream, he says, to preside over the opening of a new property. He would have preferred, though, not to have to rewrite a business plan drawn up before the onset of a foot-and-mouth crisis.
The Westin Dublin will cost about £38 million (€48.25 million) to bring 163 luxury bedrooms to the Republic's market. That works out at more than £233,000 a room, ranking it one of the biggest investments to date in an hotel in the State. The bricks-and-mortar cost is carried by Treasury Holdings, the Irish property developer. Mr Mullin's employer is Starwood Hotels & Resorts, a US public company quoted on the New York Stock Exchange, which will operate the hotel for Treasury.
Unusually for the profession, Mr Mullin has no family background in catering. He was born 45 years ago in Donegal town. In those days, he says, families who could afford it sent their sons to university to do the standard B.A. But he did not want to emerge with a qualification that was too much like any other. In 1972, he signed up for a four-year course at the Department of Hotel & Catering Management in Galway RTC.
The course included a stint as a cocktail barman in Grand Metropolitan's Mayfair Hotel in London. Clearly he and Grand Met liked each: after graduation he spent four years with them. In 1980, he was offered the opportunity to manage a privately owned hotel with a commitment from the owners to re-invest. This was not a happy experience. In a note that most people might omit from a CV, he says: "Unfortunately, no redevelopment took place and it was pointless to continue unless investment took place."
The next job brought him to Dublin for the first time, as food and beverage manager in the Shelbourne Hotel. In 1983 he went to Sun City, a resort and gambling complex about an hour-and-a-half from Johannesburg, South Africa. "It was meant to be a two-year contract.
I ended up staying there for 11 years." He and his British wife, Sue, had their two children there, Shauna and Rory.
In 1994, he was becoming uncomfortable with South Africa. The rand was going through the floor and the security situation was deteriorating. He took a job with Malaysian-based ShangriLa Hotels & Resorts as general manager with a five-star 514room property on the island of Penang. He was there for four years.
The next job brought him closer to home. He became general manager of the Caledonian Hotel in Edinburgh, one of the modestly named Leading Hotels of the World group. Two years later, he came to the attention of Starwood, which was looking for a general manager for its first venture into the Republic, the Westin.
Mr Mullin liked the idea of coming home. He wanted a good education for his children. He liked the feeling of self-confidence in Irish people, even a sense of pride. He is less enamoured of the traffic chaos in Dublin city. "That was a problem identified years ago and it should have been sorted out." Like many other returned emigrants, he is horrified by the cost of housing. "It is not so much the price of a house but how little you get for what you pay." He is currently renting in Stillorgan.
The big challenge of the new job is recruiting the right people. "It's essential to get Irish people at the interface with the customer - that's the product the hotel industry sells abroad." Getting Irish people is not that easy. Mr Mullin acknowledges that the catering industry has an image problem. "It does not command the esteem other careers do, the hours are long and you must like dealing with people, even when those people are not the type you would wish to share a desert island with."
What he is offering is a career in a company that has 750 hotels in 80 countries and 250,000 employees. He sees no reason why the hotel industry should be any different from other industries in pushing forward its best people, rather than consigning them to the traditional role of serving out their time in one position. "In a big organisation, you can do that."
He is not concerned, so far, about food-and-mouth. "We are after the corporate market. Starwood has six million regular guests."
That, by coincidence, is about the number of people who visited the Republic last year. Mr Mullin hopes that the Starwood computer reservation system will direct its customers to the Westin when they are planning a visit to the Republic.
The foot-and-mouth crisis is unwelcome, but Mr Mullin says he is more concerned about his brother hoteliers outside Dublin. Starwood has embarked on a second project in the Republic: the development of the Carton Estate in Co Kildare, which competes directly with the K Club as a venue for rich golfers whose handicap is not a lack of money.
"I don't think the Westin or Carton will be Starwood's last venture in the Irish market," says Mr Mullin.
