WHEN Seán Quinn, once Ireland’s richest man, looked to expand outside his core business of quarrying and building products in 1985, his first acquisition was the Cat & Cage pub, close to Croke Park in Dublin. He paid a reported £640,000 (€812,800).
Nearly three decades on, Quinn is bankrupt with €2.8bn in disputed debts, and the Cat & Cage is back on the market. CBRE, the selling agent, is seeking offers in excess of €650,000 for the premises on the Upper Drumcondra Road, 20% less than Quinn paid. The Cat & Cage, says John Ryan, director of hotels and pub sales at CBRE, is “a tremendous business opportunity”.
Down the road, Quinn’s in Drumcondra, another of the tycoon’s famous Quinn watering holes, also went on the block last week, seeking offers in excess of €1.6m. “Quinn’s is synonymous with big match days at Croke Park and is an institution among GAA supporters,” said Ryan. “These are two of Dublin’s most famous pubs, known the length and breadth of Ireland.”
Those, ironically, are the features that attracted Quinn, a keen GAA fan, to the Drumcondra pubs in his day. “Every time I used to come to Dublin, the pubs were always full, so I said to myself, ‘This has to be a simple business because they’re charging a ransom for the beer; they get paid for the beer before they pay Guinness’,” he said in 2007.
Back then, Quinn’s net worth was estimated at €4.7bn by Forbes magazine. Now, the pubs are at the tail end of the break-up of his group, which once spanned construction products, glass, radiators, insurance, and a clutch of pubs and hotels in Ireland and abroad. Quinn’s empire was put into receivership by Anglo Irish Bank, now IBRC, in 2011 and a complex financial restructuring was completed the following year.
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New figures show Quinn’s four Dublin pubs — including the two now on the market — and Buswells hotel in the centre of the capital were valued at just €11.5m, despite having nearly €50m in debt.
The €38.5m shortfall in the debt has been parked by IBRC with limited recourse to the assets. In 2012, the bank took direct control of the pubs, removing the landlords who had leased them from Quinn.
The Barge, a landmark pub on the Grand Canal in Dublin, is the most valuable of Quinn’s former bars, valued at €2.6m in the restructuring, the figures show. It is not on the market. JW Sweetman, near O’Connell Bridge and previously named Messrs Maguires and the Harp, was valued at €2.1m. It is leased out and is not for sale.
Buswells, which has 67 bedrooms in five townhouses across the road from Dail Eireann, was valued at €4.5m in the financial restructuring of Quinn’s former assets. It had revenues of €3.5m in 2012, figures show, and managers said the outlook “remains positive”.
The Barge, JW Sweetman and Buswells are expected to come on the market in time. The few remaining hospitality assets include the Hilton hotel in Prague, bought with an adjoining Ibis hotel for €145m in 2004, a record for a hotel deal in central Europe at the time.
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The last asset is the property most closely associated with Quinn: the Slieve Russell hotel beside his home in Co Cavan. It was revalued at €10m last year, half its previous valuation. A sale of the hotel, likely to be highly contentious, is not expected in the short term.