ONE OF the country’s best-known domestic retailers, Blarney Woollen Mills, closes its flagship Dublin store today after more than 20 years on Nassau Street.
The family-owned clothing and furnishings chain says it is shutting its doors in Dublin for a variety of reasons, including high rents and difficulties with the configuration of the shop, which is in a historic former hotel building on the corner of Nassau and Dawson streets.
Group finance director Robert Reardon said the company had a long-term lease on the premises, but found the rent level “difficult” in the current economic climate. It renegotiated its occupancy to a short-term licence arrangement, which ends this month.
Mr Reardon said Blarney offered to continue the licence arrangement but the terms it suggested were not acceptable to the landlords, whom he declined to name.
Twelve jobs are being lost with the closure, but Mr Reardon said most staff had found alternative employment.
He expressed sadness that the Blarney name was disappearing from Dublin’s streetscape but said the company was in active negotiations to open two new stores elsewhere in the city.
The rest of the group, which includes stores in Blarney, Carrick -on-Suir, Galway, Killarney and Bunratty, hotels in Bunratty and Blarney, and the Meadows and Byrne homeware chain, was trading “reasonably well” in spite of the recession, he said.
Yesterday, the shop was thronged with overseas visitors taking a break from their tours of Trinity College. Remaining stock was discounted by 25 per cent and staff said problems with flooding had already forced the closure of the basement.
Blarney has been a familiar name among Dublin shops since the 1980s, when it opened on Duke Street. In 1987, the then taoiseach Charles Haughey opened a bigger store in the former Kilkenny Design shop on Nassau Street.
The group is owned by members of the Kelleher family, whose father Tim began his business career selling trinkets to tourists kissing the Blarney Stone.
Last month, it emerged in the Revenue Commissioners list of tax defaulters that one of the directors of Blarney Woollen Mills, Charles Frank Kelleher, made a settlement for €231,000.
Further up Dawson Street, crime bookstore Murder Ink is also to close its doors as the result of the illness-enforced retirement of its owner, Michael Gallagher.
