It’s a life story that reads like the synopsis of a whole season of Succession, played out on a very public stage. But that wasn’t the initial plan for Ben Dunne junior.
Early on, Ben’s life matched the Dunne family trait of absolute secrecy in all things to do with business or private life. Aged 34, he took over from his father Ben Senior as head of Dunnes Stores and within ten years annual turn-over soared to £850 million with 90+ stores in Ireland and overseas. Ben built on the low cost model established by his father and pushed Dunnes’ suppliers for even lower prices. He found a baker willing to supply loaves of bread for 19p so he could sell them at 29p, well below the 55p that branded products cost. This was the start of the “bread wars” with other supermarkets and became a crisis for the Government of the day.
“It was like the wild west of retailing. These guys took no prisoners and the one who took the least number of prisoners was Ben Dunne,” recalls Conor Pope of the Irish Times.
In rarely seen archive of the businessman’s first ever television interview, a defiant Ben says: “If Dunnes stores was squeezed out of the marketplace in the morning because of our competitors, I wouldn’t blame our competitors. I’d blame our management for been weak.”
As Dunnes Stores’ market share grew points, Ben and his siblings grew incredibly rich. It was an Irish success story without parallel in the 1980’s.
The family fortune made Ben Junior a target for an IRA kidnap gang in 1981. Extraordinary archive captures the desperate search for Ben and the numerous attempts by the Dunne family to pay a ransom which were all blocked by Gardai.
Alan Dukes was a member of the cabinet at the time. “Of course there was concern in the cabinet with the life of the kidnapped person. We wanted to avoid a killing as an outcome but I have to say that the blood on the hands would be on the hands of the kidnappers first.”
After a six day captivity north of the border, Ben was released when a ransom of £500,000 was reputedly paid to the IRA. The kidnap catapulted Ben into the public spotlight, much to the horror of his father, always deeply suspicious of the media.
After his ordeal Ben, true to family form, took just one day off work and was back in his office on the Friday morning, as if nothing had changed. But Ben Dunne’s life was about to spiral out of control.
The fall-out from his infamous antics with call-girls and cocaine during a golfing trip to Florida in 1992 had a domino effect that no-one could have predicted. Ben’s lavish lifestyle was now on view and in the full glare of publicity.
Stan Spanich was a deputy Sheriff with Orange County Police, Florida in 1992 when he received a call of a man on the ledge Grand Cypress Hotel in Florida. He tells the documentary that he was tasked to talk Ben down.
“He was a big man. Looking at him, it was fear, it was terror. I’m like we can help you.”
“I’ve seen a lot of people in distress. He was bad. He needed help,” recalls Spanich of the dramatic rescue of Ben.
Arriving home in Dublin, Ben admitted he made a terrible blunder and vowed never to do it again. However, Ben would later tell Gay Byrne that he was a “secret user” between “the late 80’s up to 94.”
His drug addiction and increasingly erratic behaviour caused a bitter Dunne family feud which uncovered secret payments made by Ben.
Irish Times journalist Cliff Taylor was following the money trail. “There had been long term gossip and speculation about where Charlie Haughey got all his money…it had become a thing over a period of time that Ben Dunne had paid money to “Mr You Know Who.”
The scandal would lead to the “payment to politicians” tribunals that would destroy the reputation of former Taoiseach Charlie Haughey.
Forced out of the Dunnes retail empire with a £125 million pay-off, Ben wasn’t prepared to go anywhere quietly. He re-invented himself as an unlikely fitness entrepreneur willing to sell anything from gym memberships to cut-price sandwiches, hoping to re-kindle that Midas touch.
Like many larger-than-life characters Ben Dunne was a complex person, full of bizarre contradictions; he projected the aura of a man of simple tastes, but had an indulgent lifestyle with a private yacht, a mansion and an art collection worth over €10 million; he was disarmingly kind and generous at a personal level, but ruthless in pursuit of a business deal; he was openly religious and yet morally ambivalent, telling his accountant “you have your fucking ethics … I have a business to run”.
Broadcaster Joe Duffy also reveals a side to Ben that no-one knew about. “I was aware that he was very generous anonymously to people who were in difficulty. Ben Dunne was never found wanting. His largesse went way beyond Charlie Haughey…but that largesse was never properly acknowledged. ”
By the end, the once publicity shy Ben Dunne had come full circle, exploiting his fame on radio ads for his fitness gyms and dispensing homilies, poems and folksy wisdom on chat shows and tabloid columns. There was even talk of a TV show along the lines of Trump’s The Apprentice.
ENDS
