15/11/2025
It's been two years since Francis and John Brennan announced the sale of the Park Hotel Kenmare, the five-star they had run for over 40 years (the hotel had been on the market, with sister property, The Lansdowne, for €20.5m).
But if you thought the two have been resting on their laurels, forget it. ‘Retirement’ is a term given short shrift when we meet in Dublin’s Radisson Blu St Helen’s Hotel for tea, scones and a state-of-the nation chat.
“Not one bit… I walked out on November 17 [2023], and I never looked back. My mother always used to say, ‘He compartmentalises everything.’ And I obviously do. Because after 42 years of going in every day and doing everything as we did, I just walked out. Nobody’s more surprised than I am.”
Would they ever do another hotel together?
“Never,” Francis says.
“No. There’s no sequel,” John agrees.
“The céad míle fáilte is under threat,” Francis says, blaming “a proliferation of three- and four-star hotels that are run by accountants in offices”. The rise of “uninteresting, mid-market hotels”, as John puts it, and the decline of B&Bs, town centre hotels and owner-run stays with warmly involved, hands-on managers is a bugbear of both.
“Hundreds and hundreds of B&Bs have closed in Ireland in the last six to eight years,” Francis says. “And then people are just taking keys out of lockboxes. They never meet anybody…. the 100,000 welcomes is around 50,000 now, I think. And I’m worried it’s going to go below that.”
“I don’t understand why you would go into business in this country anymore, because everything is stacked against you. Not one thing has been introduced in recent governments that was in favour of the entrepreneur or the business person," John adds
