Ben Dunne snr would have been horrified by the thought of a 358-page book about his family retail empire.
“If there’s one thing I hate, it’s publicity,” the notoriously gruff founder of Dunnes Stores told The Irish Times in 1971. During the only significant interview he ever gave, Ben snr also compared himself to the pope, claimed his only hobby was work and dubbed young Dunnes customers “sheep all dressed together”.
As Matt Cooper notes in his expertly researched, respectful but unsparing corporate biography, however, old Ben could hardly blame him for choosing such a commercial subject.
“The story of Dunnes Stores is simply better than any other business saga in the history of the Irish State,” Cooper asserts. It involves boardroom battles, political scandals and addiction traumas while also tracking 80 years of Ireland’s changing shopping habits.
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Dunnes Stores is intensely private about its inner workings and Dynasty can often only guess at them. Cooper did interview the late Ben jnr many times, but rejected his publisher’s initial idea to write a biography of this mercurial character. Instead, he has crafted an impressively multifaceted narrative by blending economic analysis, anecdotes from Dunnes associates and his own reporting experiences.
Naturally, it begins with Ben snr, a draper’s apprentice from Rostrevor, Co Down, who opened his first outlet on Cork’s St Patrick’s Street in 1944. His “stack ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap” philosophy, replicas of international fashions and aggressive negotiations with suppliers were a winning formula, soon expanded throughout Ireland. “I don’t get ulcers, I give them,” he boasted, but in what becomes Dynasty’s running theme, it appears that vast wealth did not make him particularly happy.
At the Shelbourne Hotel, where old Ben spent his last decade, he rarely tipped and ate gourmet meals with tomato ketchup. He expected total deference from his staff, with even senior executives required to call him “Mr Dunne”. He set up a trust to ensure his children would continue to run Dunnes Stores, but in Cooper’s words, “maintaining control from beyond the grave is an egotistical illusion”.
Before Ben snr’s death in 1983, eldest son Frank had been the heir apparent. Sadly, he preferred breeding horses to flogging jumpers, developed a drink problem and wound up a near-recluse. Two other siblings, Elizabeth and Therese, also led troubled lives blighted by alcohol and died in their mid-40s.
The mantle was taken up by brash Ben jnr, who vigorously fought Ireland’s burgeoning supermarket price wars and once declared: “In business, it helps if you have an enemy.” His brusque treatment of workers who refused to handle fruit from apartheid-era South Africa led one trade unionist to call Dunnes “the unacceptable face of Irish capitalism”.
By then, Cooper suggests, young Ben already had severe mental health issues. Dynasty includes a visceral account of how he was kidnapped by the Provisional IRA in 1981, an experience that at one point involved him hiding in an open grave.
Cooper explores several intriguing theories about who paid the ransom, without reaching any firm conclusion. He adds a jaw-dropping revelation that some years later Ben privately admitted he had hired three men to abduct “a well-known entertainer” whose wife he was sleeping with, take him up the Dublin Mountains and threaten his life. “It is entirely possible,” the author cautiously warns, “[Ben] embellished the tale”.
Ben’s fall from grace is a more familiar story, related by Cooper in granular and colourful detail. During his infamous cocaine-fuelled meltdown with an escort in a Florida hotel, he stripped to his boxers, came close to jumping off a 17th-floor, resulting balcony and swung a piece of wood around “like some crazed King Kong”.
His secret payments to Charles Haughey and Michael Lowry had a domino effect, resulting in the McCracken tribunal. After meticulously dissecting this murky affair, Cooper reaches a melancholy conclusion: Ben’s primary motive when giving politicians cash was “his need for people to like him”.
In Haughey’s case, that generosity clearly failed. Recalling the day he guided Dunne around Abbeville in a wheelchair (Ben had broken both ankles during another panic attack), the ex-taoiseach reportedly lamented: “If I’d known what was going to happen, I’d have pushed him into the lake.”
Fortunately for Dunnes Stores, at least one of Ben snr’s offspring inherited his ruthless discipline. Dynasty ends with an admiring profile of the religious, charitable but steely Margaret Heffernan, who since assuming control after Ben jnr’s implosion, has moved Dunnes upmarket while retaining its distinct identity.
“Name another woman who has done more in Irish business,” Cooper rhetorically asks his readers. With Margaret’s daughter Anne and niece Sarah now taking up leadership positions, the quintessentially Irish brand looks certain to remain a family concern.
“Better value beats them all!” was once Dunnes Stores’s ubiquitous advertising slogan. This compelling warts-and-all group portrait, however, shows why some Dunne descendants must have wondered if old Ben’s legacy was really such a great bargain.
