“Liam was born in 1950 and would have been 73 this coming May. In late 2009, Liam and I attended our uncle Robin’s funeral in Mullingar – the eulogy enumerated his many wonderful features – as we left the chapel Liam, feeling the weight of the recent crash falling upon him, …. muttered ‘Well there won’t be anyone saying any words like that about me’…I replied ‘Oh shut up’…‘I promise I will, I will tell people lots of wonderful things about you!’” – from the eulogy of Siobhan O’Dwyer, a sister of Liam O’Dwyer, at St Mary’s, Star of the Sea Church, Sandymount, on February 24, 2023. 

The Alhambra Palace in Granada is one of the seven wonders of the Muslim World. A Moorish oasis of beautiful gardens, fountains, and ornate buildings, it is an incredible combination of fortress, palace, and medina. 

In 1996, the publican Liam O’Dwyer brought some of his design team there to find inspiration for a new pub he was planning to build on the then-unfashionable north side of the River Liffey in Dublin. 

O’Dwyer had bought an old auction house called Lawlor Briscoe on Dublin’s North Quays. It was to become Zanzibar. 

Architect Ross Cahill-O’Brien recalls going on the trip with O’Dwyer along with Oliver Brady, an art and design consultant. Others went too, all tasked with sourcing ideas to create a new destination bar in Dublin, one that would be capable of housing 1,600 revellers simultaneously.  “All the attention was on Temple Bar on the southside,” Cahill-O’Brien recalls. “The other side of the city was collapsed and run-down. There were derelict buildings and tyre shops. Nobody wanted to go there. Liam wanted to create something special to make people make the jump across the Liffey.” 

According to Cahill-O’Brien, it was the sound of the word that prompted O’Dwyer to name the bar Zanzibar, a former Sultanate-isle off the coast of Tanzania: “It was the sound of exotic spices, he wanted it to be like nothing Dublin had ever seen before.”

Zanzibar’s gold-tinted vaulted ceilings and star-shaped windows with golden obelisks would be inspired by his trip to Andalusia. Giant urns, palm trees, hand-painted tiles, arches, and brass light-fittings would all be added later. 

“It was a bit blingy,” Cahill-O’Brien laughs, “but it was fun.” 

O’Dwyer filled warehouses with items salvaged from scrap yards or bought in auctions in America, Britain, and Europe. All were for use in his ever-growing hospitality empire. 

“It was always about creating a cinematic environment for people,” Oliver Brady says. “Liam wanted them to feel like they were in a movie. He could have been a movie director, as he could walk into a space and just start drawing what it could become in his mind.” 

Cahill-O’Brien also remembers how enjoyable the trip to southern Spain was despite the heat. 

O’Dwyer was a strongly built man, as were his companions; all were crammed into a tiny rental car beneath an unforgiving sun.

“It was only when we were ten miles from the airport on the way home that we figured out you had to press a button to get the air-conditioning on,” Cahill-O’Brien says. 

“Well Liam laughed. He was that type of person. He was great to be around.”

*****

Liam O’Dwyer was a brilliant publican. He was innovative and prepared to take risks. At his peak, with the support of his brother Des, his bar and hotel empire employed between 1,500 and 2,000 people and had annual revenues of more than €60 million. Over the decades O’Dwyer tore a blazing trail in Dublin. He created the idea of the super-pub and was the first to open late night bars With his brother Des. He started a company called DSD which became the biggest restroom service and sanitation disposal company in Dublin, and helped fund his hospitality business. O’Dwyer was ambitious, hard-working, and generous. Hundreds of thousands of Irish people and tourists met, ate, drank, danced, slept, or fell in love in his venues. O’Dwyer was unapologetically populist and wasn’t interested in catering to the elite or the cool. 

This is the list of the venues he created or owned or built:

• Cafe en Seine, Dawson Street Dublin 2
• The George, South Great Georges St Dublin 2
• The Dragon, South Great Georges St Dublin 2
• Howl at the Moon, Lower Mount St. Dublin 2
• The Night Train Club, Lower Mount St Dublin 2
• Dance Macabre, Lower Mount St Dublin 2
• The Pizza Cellar, Lower Mount St Dublin 2
• Dandelion, St Stephens Green, Dublin 2
• Cafe Cairo, Pearse St, Dublin 2
• Zanzibar Bar, Ormond Quay, Dublin 1
• Break for the Border, Johnson Place, Dublin 2
• Break for the Border, Leeds UK
• Break for the Border, Cardiff UK
• Break for the Border, Peterborough, UK
• Break for the Border, London x 2
• Bad Bobs, Temple Bar, Dublin 2
• Fireworks, Tara St, Dublin 2
• Coyote, D’Olier St Dublin 2
• Sinnotts, St King St Dublin 2
• Major Toms, St King St Dublin 2
• Swamp Critters, Rathmines, Dublin 6
• Hotel Developments:
• The Trinity Capital Hotel, Pearse St Dublin 2
• The Grafton Capital Hotel, Johnson Place Dublin 2
• The Rathmines Capital Hotel Dublin 6
• A plan for a 500-bed hotel behind Zanzibar

At the trough of Ireland’s financial crisis, Liam O’Dwyer was like so many under the cosh of too much debt in a collapsing economy. Around 2011, O’Dwyer decided to write his business story down. The title he gave it was: “The Road to Zanzibar.” 

All aboard the night train 

Liam O’Dwyer grew up in Clonskeagh, the second oldest of four children of Joe O’Dwyer and Phylis Maxwell. His sister Mary was the eldest, and Des was his younger brother with Siobhan the youngest. From Tipperary, O’Dwyer’s father Joe owned two pubs in Dublin 2. 

“Liam was 9 years my senior – a gentle, kind big brother – my little hand in his big hand was the safest place on earth – and that never changed. During my life, he always looked out for me…” Siobhan O’Dwyer recalled in her eulogy. 

After school, Liam O’Dwyer went to Trinity College Dublin, but only for a year. “By the early 1970’s, Liam was coerced out of university by my father to work in his pubs O’Dwyer’s of Mount Street and Leeson Street, a pair of typical bars for their time, swirly gold and floral carpets, brown mahogany furniture, dark ‘tell them he is not here’ snugs and the smell of John Player Blue cigarettes,” Siobhan O’Dwyer recalls.

Joe O’Dwyer was a strong character who liked his pubs to be run in a certain way. However, his son Liam could see a new generation of young people in Dublin wanted more. “Liam set about changing things… whilst our patriarchal conservative father was away on a winter holiday, he opened an upstairs lounge in Leeson Street. Its carpets were lifted, and club chairs and a new retro look attracted the student set from UCD in Earlsfort Terrace and the actors and players from the Focus Theatre,” Siobhan O’Dwyer says. 

When Joe O’Dwyer went on a three-month holiday to Australia, Liam O’Dwyer revamped his Lower Mount Street pub. “My father nearly had a seizure, but Liam was a quiet rebel and did not let this hold him back,” Siobhan O’Dwyer remembers.

Both pubs were now making more money, so Liam O’Dwyer was forgiven by his father.  

In 1980, a property next door to O’Dwyer’s of Mount Street was purchased, an acquisition that allowed the bar to double in size. The family sold their Leeson Street bar on good terms to Matt O’Dwyer, a first cousin, to help fund the deal. 

“This development was a huge success at the time and was the first Victorian restoration, a ‘brass glass and fern bar’ which was to revolutionise the direction of popular pub design for the following decade,” Liam O’Dwyer recalled in The Road To Zanzibar. 

The O’Dwyers set up a business supplying other bars that needed fixtures and fittings to bring original Victorian pubs back to life. Siobhan O’Dwyer believes that the “success of the refurbishment of O’Dwyer’s arrested the destruction of original Victorian pubs”. 

The pub was one of the first to offer a full-service luncheon carvery and fresh soup. In 1985 it opened an authentic Italian pizzeria in its basement, and Liam recruited a third-generation pizza chef Antonio Casella from Naples to run it.

“A new arena for the gene pool to easily network had been created to replace the traditional ballroom of the 60’s and the brash discotheque of the 70’s. The boy meets girl entertainment bar had arrived,” Liam O’Dwyer wrote. 

In 1988 O’Dwyer bought the garden of nearby 36 Merrion Square which he developed as a new two-storey-over-basement venue called The Night Train. 

It was Ireland’s first super-pub – a destination for people to go in Dublin that was open late seven days a week with live music. In 2005 this venue would be reopened even bigger as Howl at the Moon, a late-night venue set across multiple floors.

*****

Architect Ross Cahill-O’Brien first worked for Liam O’Dwyer on The Night Train. Cahill-O’Brien had just returned from London where he trained and where he had won the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) national portfolio prize. He was working for Edmondson Architects and had already made an impression working on Tosca, a restaurant on Suffolk Street owned by Norman Hewson, the older brother of Bono, that had entertained Bruce Springsteen, Naomi Campbell, and Bob Dylan. 

Cahill-O’Brien, who later worked for U2 on the design of the Kitchen nightclub in the Clarence Hotel, recalls fondly meeting O’Dwyer in the early 1990s. “We were trying to be cutting edge, young and modern,” he says. 

Night Train had an industrial aesthetic with stainless steel panelling and iron bar stools cast in a mould taken from an elephant’s shin bone. 

Ronan Corrigan, a skilled carpenter who would eventually lead a team of up to 30 people working on projects for O’Dwyer, also worked on The Night Train. He already knew O’Dwyer from working on Sinnotts Pub underneath the St Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre when he was 29. After that, he had worked on O’Dwyer’s pub on Mount Street before being asked to help with its adjoining nightclub.  

“Ross helped take Liam to another zone,” Corrigan says. “There was nothing like The Night Train in Dublin at the time.” 

Over the decades to come, Cahill-O’Brien and Corrigan would be part of a close-knit team who would work with O’Dwyer on transforming Dublin’s nightlife. 

“Liam was a gentleman to deal with,” Corrigan says when asked why they stuck together. “We had differences of opinion over the years but never a row. He always looked after everyone. He was always looking to get better, and a lot of people learned a lot of things working on his jobs. He always made a point of trying to know everyone’s name.”

Boy meets girl

Michael Olohan was a civil servant working in the National Gallery of Ireland as its chief photographer in the late 1980s. He bumped into Liam O’Dwyer in his pub on Mount Street and complained to him that he had shut down a dry cleaners he used to use to expand his bar. “Liam laughed at this, and we started to talk,” Olohan recalls. 

When O’Dwyer heard that Olohan worked in the National Gallery, he asked him to help him hang a series of Italian paintings in his bar that he had picked up in an auction. A friendship began, and O’Dwyer used to drop into the Dew Drop Inn in Kildare after Olohan bought an interest in it after it fell into financial difficulty. 

One day O’Dwyer saw an ad in The Sunday Times to take on a pub underneath St Stephens Green Shopping Centre, and he asked Olohan if he’d like to get involved in it. 

“A basement pub in a shopping centre won’t work,” Olohan replied. “Dun Laoghaire shopping centre for example had tried to have a pub in it, and it was a failure.” 

But O’Dwyer insisted that his friend view it – he even offered to buy him lunch as an incentive. 

“I remember seeing this huge, cavernous basement with 18 feet high ceilings. It didn’t feel like a basement, and there was no access to the shopping centre which was also good.’” 

In 1988, O’Dwyer and Olohan agreed to co-invest in the bar which they named Sinnotts after a bar that previously existed on South King Street. 

Olohan suggested a literary theme to reflect Sinnotts’ heritage, and he set about buying up artworks featuring Irish writers. About a kilometre away, hoteliers the O’Callaghan family were building a new hotel called the Davenport in a former church built in the classical revival neo-Baroque style. O’Dwyer bought all the pews and woodwork from this church and had them reworked into the furnishings of Sinnotts. 

“A sterile triangular premises was transformed by the use of salvaged building materials, and it became another go-to destination,” Siobhan O’Dwyer recalled in her eulogy. 

A lot of thought was put into the layout of Sinnotts. He put the bar in the centre of the main room and ensured everyone could see everyone from every location. Sinnotts also invested in its toilets, as O’Dwyer did in all his venues. “Liam wanted the bathrooms in all of his venues to be beautiful, especially for women,” Oliver Cassidy said. “He would put baroque mirrors on the wall and use rose-tinted glass. Liam knew that if the toilets were clean and spotless then women would come back, and they would bring the men with them.” 

There was another investor in Sinnotts called Gerry O’Beirne, who fell out with his partners early on. He took an action against them, which was dismissed in the High Court. 

But it was a costly experience for the two fledgling business partners. Sinnotts was also the start of O’Dwyer’s relationship with an up-and-coming bank. “A relatively newly formed small commercial bank, called Anglo Irish Bank provided the fit-out finance of £300,000,” Liam O’Dwyer wrote. From then on Anglo was the financier of choice to O’Dwyer and his rapidly growing empire. 

Running the gauntlet

In 1990, O’Dwyer acquired Bartley Dunne’s, a renowned pub owned by the Dunne family near Grafton Street on Johnson Place, Dublin 2. Movie stars Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor had drunk there, and the pub was gay-friendly at a time when homosexuality was a criminal offence in Dublin. Liam O’Dwyer demolished the pub and replaced it with the Grafton Plaza and Break for the Border. 

Oliver Brady met Liam O’Dwyer in 1991 when he was working on this ambitious project. Brady had just finished refurbishing the resident’s bar in the Burlington Hotel in Dublin 4 and O’Dwyer was impressed by its murals and use of gold leaf, so he’d asked him to help develop Break for the Border.  

“The theme that Liam wanted was a Mexicano wild west vibe,” Brady recalled. 

The idea for Break for the Border was inspired by a multi-floor cowboy-themed venue in Orlando which O’Dwyer had visited on his travels in North America.

Brady designed a huge cowboy mural in the nightclub part of Break for the Border and gave it a bordello feel elsewhere. The ceiling took six weeks to hand-paint, with small holes drilled in it to allow fake rats to peek out. According to Corrigan, O’Dwyer bought original furniture and fittings from a bar in Las Vegas at an auction in Atlanta to kit out Break for the Border. “He bought about $40,000 worth of mirrors, chandeliers, and lighting and shipped them all home in a container,” Corrigan recalls. The hotel and nightclub were developed by Liam and Des O’Dwyer, and his cousin Matt O’Dwyer.

More than 1,000 people turned up when Break for the Border opened in 1992; for years it was a phenomenal success popularising everything from line-dancing to Mexican food in Dublin. 

The day before the venue opened O’Dwyer climbed onto the back of a life-size bronze horse in the plaza in front of the venue for a photo taken by his friends. The horse, complete with fearsome native American warrior, became a landmark in Dublin. It was designed by Frederic Remington, perhaps the most famous artist in the Western American style who died in 1909.  

Hotels were entitled to a drinks licence, so once Break for the Border opened it meant O’Dwyer was left with a spare licence previously held by Bartley Dunne’s. 

O’Dwyer decided to transfer this to a new pub he was planning on Dawson Street. This hadn’t been done before and it provoked uproar from other publicans who felt it would devalue their licences. “We ran the gauntlet of substantial objections to planning and licensing until finally a successful High Court decision in April 1993,” Liam O’Dwyer wrote. 

“The landlord was prepared to wait the twelve months of litigation because no other likely tenants existed for the property.”

Inventing the late bar

In 1993 a second pub in the basement of St Stephen’s Green called Bennigans run by businessman Gerry Harrington got into trouble, and receivers were appointed by ICC Bank. O’Dwyer decided to take this pub over, figuring if he got bigger, he could recover some of the money he had lost defending the action taken by his former business partner in Sinnotts. 

This bar would become Major Toms; it was music-led and was packed with rock and pop memorabilia that O’Dwyer collected by driving his van to auctions in Britain. 

Major Toms became the first late-night bar in Dublin. Up until then, there was a distinction between nightclubs and bars, with nightclubs being allowed to stay open later under Ireland’s archaic licensing laws that required a meal to be served to any nightclub goer who wanted it. Nightclubs as a result charged an entrance fee, but Major Toms decided to scrap any charge.

“Within a few months, the term ‘late bar’ originated in Major Toms was to become generic in the licence trade, and the on-trade competition lined up to discover the route to late exemptions. The trick was to supply the mandatory ‘supper’ free because very few had it in any event, and eliminate the door charge,” O’Dwyer wrote. Major Toms was a roaring success.  

****

Jay Bourke opened the Globe Bar and Rí Rá nightclub around the same time in the early 1990s as O’Dwyer was expanding his business. “I think Major Toms was the first late bar in Ireland, with the Globe probably the second,” Bourke says “Liam was incredibly innovative. Liam would go to brownfield sites that were derelict and bring something new to life. I think he saw that as his contribution to Dublin.” 

Bourke added: “When he moved the licence (to Dawson Street) that was a pathfinder case. Lots of people tried to stop him but Liam stuck at it and won. He de facto liberalised the market.

“I used to call Liam the general because he thought so strategically about his business. He was always thinking ahead.

“Liam believed that nothing succeeds like excess… Liam had his own taste – it wasn’t necessarily mine!” Bourke laughed. “But think about the number of tourists coming to Dublin. The numbers were going up by the millions and Dublin badly needed more places for them to go. Liam helped meet that need.

“Liam employed a lot of people. He paid a lot of taxes, and he made Dublin more fun. He always treated people really well, and above all was very kind.” 

Creating Cafe en Seine

In the same year that Major Toms was coming together, Liam O’Dwyer embarked on an even more ambitious project at Number 40 Dawson Street after transferring Bartley Dunne’s licence there. When O’Dwyer visited Number 40 Dawson Street for the first time he saw the previous occupants had installed a plastic suspended ceiling. 

O’Dwyer picked up a sweeping brush and started banging on the cheap tiles to break them to see what was above. He discovered a spectacular dome and vaulted glass ceiling.

Financing the transformation of 40 Dawson Street wasn’t going to be easy. “This was financed by family and friends,” O’Dwyer wrote. “Anglo Irish Bank did not participate in the funding because they believed their exposure to the investors was maxed out,” O’Dwyer wrote. 

The theme of Dawson Street was the Belle Époque in Paris. O’Dwyer was reported to have spent €3 million collecting early 1900s bronze busts, marble-topped tables, ornate mirrors, and Art Nouveau stained glass from auction houses in Europe and America. 

“Sourcing material to create his venues included travels to auctions, furniture fairs, and shows in Las Vegas, Milan, Atlanta, Belgium, and Holland – busman holidays frequently accompanied by his partner Mary who perhaps more enthusiastically enjoyed these holidays than his daughters Lorraine, Anne Marie and Michelle,” Siobhan O’Dwyer recalled. 

Creating the venue was O’Dwyer’s greatest challenge so far, but he threw himself into it. Everything was now coming together for the grand opening of what was one of the most impressive bars ever seen in Dublin: Cafe en Seine.

Cafe en Seine served daytime food and coffee, which was again unusual back then.  “It is fair to say that a decent cappuccino could be had in Cafe en Seine in 1993 about 12 years before Michael McDowell had his doomed continental cafe bar concept,” O’Dwyer reflected. 

In 2001, Cafe en Seine was made even bigger by buying an adjacent building and it established itself as a place for people to meet before apps like Tinder existed. While its interiors were lavish, it was resolutely unpretentious. “Liam disregarded celebrity,” Brady recalled. “He always wanted to create places for boy meets girl.” 

When The Sunday Independent gossip columnist Terry Keane turned up at Cafe en Seine after attending another event, O’Dwyer politely turned her away. Not that Keane was the only person who couldn’t get in. 

“Liam was an easily recognisable man about town with his unique styles of dress – which went from covered in dust, the Bricky look, to the boulevardier gent with Panama hat to the Hawaiian tourist look in his much-loved Tommy Bahama beach shirts,” Siobhan O’Dwyer recalled. “Liam didn’t follow fashion he just loved to do his own thing and dressed to suit his mood.”

“Unfortunately, this meant occasionally his own bouncers rejected him at the door! And there was one incident where he was putting out the bin and got mistaken for the bin man! And Liam would laugh this off.”

O’Dwyer knew to the inch what size his bars needed to be. How to let a crowd flow around a bar without being either too wide or too narrow, or how much space was needed behind a bar to allow busy bar tenders pass each other at speed. “Liam was a great people watcher,” Brady says. “He would always notice how long a customer had to wait to get a drink, and try to figure out how to fix that if it was too long.” 

O’Dwyer was known too for his decency to his family and those who worked for him. 

“If I called him with a problem – he would drop everything, bring me to a restaurant, fill me up with food and wine, embolden my spirit, and drop a cheque into my handbag for good measure,” Siobhan O’Dwyer recalled.

“Liam’s kindness and generosity was not limited to me as I read in the last few days and weeks texts and letters from cousins friends and many others on how his generosity was spread so widely and felt by many, the free pad, part-time and full jobs, help with college fees, the lifts, the business and personal loans. Given his understated and unassuming personality, he would not have realised the impact he had on all those that were closest to him and further afield.”

*****

In November 1993, Ian Howard came into Break for the Border asking for its owner. He was told to go to Mount Street where Liam O’Dwyer was working. Howard was a musician turned chief executive of a British pub group called Break for the Border Plc which had two venues in London at the time. 

When O’Dwyer heard Howard was there he feared he was going to be sued for inadvertently using his business name. “I have just been to see Break for the Border and it is absolutely amazing,” Howard said. “Would you sell it to me? As I’d like to buy it.” 

O’Dwyer had spent €11 million creating Break for the Border and he’d poured money into his other bars, so cashflow was tight even if trading was good. 

After negotiations, Break for the Border plc decided to buy all the bars he owned. “Ian was on a roll-out mission to expand the Plc units and was impressed with the Dublin operations and subsequently a deal was completed to acquire all the leaseholds in July 1994,” Liam O’Dwyer wrote. “The Dublin acquisition proved to be very successful for the Plc and a full share earnout was paid to the vendors.” As part of the deal, Liam O’Dwyer and his team went to work for the Plc, and they opened Break for the Borders in Leeds, Cardiff, and Peterborough, and refurbished its two existing venues in London. Being an employee, however, didn’t suit O’Dwyer’s nature.

From The George to Dandelion

In 1995 Liam O’Dwyer and Aidan Corcoran, commercial director, resigned from Break for the Border Plc. In July of that year, they teamed up with family-owned builders Cosgrave Developments to build the Rathmines Plaza Hotel and Swamp Critters Bar which opened in late 1996. Taxis in Dublin were limited, so this new venue became popular with people who didn’t want the hassle of town. 

In 1996, O’Dwyer bought The George on South Great George’s Street from Cyril O’Brien. Jack Kirwan, a nephew of O’Dwyer, recalls his uncle telling him the story of how it came about. “Cyril invited Liam to meet at his pub, The George,” Jack Kirwan, his nephew, says. “He wanted to sell it and thought Liam might be interested. Whilst sitting there Liam noticed something a bit unusual about the place, he asked Cyril, ‘Is there something a bit different about this place Cyril’ who replied, ‘Yes Liam there is, this is a gay bar and I am gay, have you any issue with that?’ Liam laughed and reassured him, ‘I’ve enough to be worried about in my own life!’” 

Liam bought the pub and outed it, giving Dublin’s gay community somewhere to go openly for the first time, just a few years after Ireland decriminalised homosexuality.

The George was so successful that around 2001 O’Dwyer converted another nearby bar called Sosume to the Dragon, as The George struggled to cope with the demand from its customers. 

The late 1990s were busy for O’Dwyer. He bought Bad Bobs in Temple Bar in 1997, and after refurbishment, it reopened in July 2000. O’Dwyer paid a record £3 million for Bad Bobs which was owned by his friend Gerry O’Reilly. In a rare profile in The Sunday Business Post in November 1997, O’Reilly said of the O’Dwyer brothers: “You won’t find two finer or more decent men to do business with anywhere.” The article also quoted Robbie Fox, the owner of the nightclub Reynards, who said: “He’s so full of ideas it is incredible. He has certainly improved the quality of the Dublin pub scene…He’s one of Dublin’s and business’s gentlemen.” 

In 1998 O’Dwyer also bought a site on the junction of Tara Street and Pearse Street that same year. This became the Trinity Capital Hotel which opened along with a nightclub called Fireworks in October 2000. In 2006 the hotel added 80 more rooms. “This extension proved very expensive as it also involved the restoration of four Georgian houses on Pearse St. which were in a very bad state of decline and could have almost justified demolition,” O’Dwyer wrote. “Unfortunately for the investors, the planning permission required their complete restoration. This requirement ultimately made the project very costly and yielded very little in terms of additional bedrooms in the four houses. In 2006 another 14 bedrooms were added, and then another 24 rooms in 2008 where Fireworks nightclub was located taking its total capacity to 200 rooms.”

“Converting an old fire station into a hotel was the hardest job I did for Liam,” Corrigan recalled. 

Another big project that O’Dwyer undertook was an urban renewal site on Ormond Quay. This opened in 1998 as Zanzibar. O’Dwyer built Zanzibar so the building could support a hotel being built on a site behind it which he spent a fortune assembling. 

In 1999, a bidder emerged for Break for the Border Plc making a cash offer to buy the business in Ireland and Britain, putting it in play. Dublin publican Hugh O’Regan’s Thomas Read Group tried to upset things by launching a rival bid but the O’Dwyer brothers saw him off in what The Irish Times described as “an emphatic victory for the O’Dwyers.” 

O’Dwyer said he would sell out of Break for the Border plc if he got to keep the Irish bars. This meant he needed to raise money to finance their purchase which he did.

Despite O’Regan trying to spoil the take-private, O’Dwyer never held it against him. When a year later during the tech bubble, O’Regan tried to set up a website to bulk buy beer for Irish publicans called Bartrader.com, O’Dwyer supported him. Stephen O’Regan, a son of the late Hugh O’Regan, remembers his father appreciating this support: “Essentially Dad tried to take down what he saw as the brewing cartel… and get all bars in the country to sign up to a new way of ordering drinks.

“I remember going to one meeting in the Red Cow and Liam O’Dwyer sat on the panel supporting the effort. It was a big deal to get a rival bar owner involved and gave credibility to the concept which was daring to say the least.” 

In 2000 the O’Dwyers’ pub group now called Capital Bars bought the high-profile Planet Hollywood on St Stephens Green for €1.71 million. The venue was opened three years earlier by an American company with ten thousand people turning up for its grand opening featuring Hollywood stars Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. PJ Mara was roped in to do the public relations with Irish guests including Bertie Ahern, Bob Geldof, and Brenda Fricker. 

After the initial buzz, Planet Hollywood burnt out after expanding too quickly causing its parent company to file for bankruptcy in the United States. Capital Bars stepped in and bought the venue with the plan to turn it into a bar, restaurant, and nightclub. Relations with the adjacent five-star Fitzwilliam Hotel were poor. “The unit endured significant litigation under planning and licensing issues from the Fitzwilliam Hotel and ultimately never performed at its full potential,” O’Dwyer wrote. “The litigation by the 5-star Fitzwilliam Hotel attempted to prevent the operation of the unit principally moving from a restaurant to a restaurant with bar and dancing fire cert approval aka nightclub. Whilst the premises did finally obtain full permissions and the approved planning the cost of the protracted litigation and interruption in trading was frustrating and an enormous burden.” O’Dwyer invested €5 million in creating a new venue called Dandelion, named after a market where U2 played their early gigs. O’Dwyer would eventually sell Dandelion at a steep loss in March 2008, as Ireland lurched towards the brink of bankruptcy and bailout.  

A sky lounge at the top of the hotel would have been spectacular

Around 2003 Liam O’Dwyer realised that things were changing. He did not foresee the crisis but he started to look at selling his pubs in order to concentrate on hotel rooms. “A change of direction away from super pubs was required and we decided to redirect with a greater concentration of city centre hotel bedrooms,” O’Dwyer wrote. 

In a five year period O’Dwyer sold Sinnotts, Major Toms, Coyote, and Dandelion. Publican Chris Kelly who bought Sinnotts in 2003 said: “I don’t think Liam saw the crash; it was more a natural progression for a lot of publicans as they get older to move towards hotels.” 

Kelly recalls meeting O’Dwyer for the first time only after he bought Sinnotts. O’Dwyer told him he had left all the artworks in the pub for Kelly, and when they were later valued a set of illustrations by the artist Miceal O’Nuallain, the brother of Brian O’Nolan aka the author Flann O’Brien, were valued in the tens of thousands. The fact O’Dwyer left the paintings behind him was testament to the way he did business. He was never mean.

Bad Bobs was also sold, and O’Dwyer used the money to continue to expand the Trinity Capital Hotel and push forward with his plans for not one but two connected hotels at the back of Zanzibar. “Against the background of the developing storm, planning permission had been obtained in 2004 for a fourth hotel development over Zanzibar and the property surrounding it,” Liam O’Dwyer wrote. “This location alongside Dublin’s iconic Halfpenny Bridge was easily identified as having unique longevity existing as it sits in the bulls-eye of Dublin city.” 

“Rumours began to circulate that CIE was going to sell the Abbey / Strand St site at the rear of Zanzibar. It was decided to hold off the Zanzibar Hotel which was ready to go to see what opportunities arose on the CIE site.

“In February 2006 CIE looked for tenders for the site but with a requirement for a developer to build a bus exchange at ground level.

“The project would be that the successful tenderer would have to acquire the site at a price and build the bus exchange for CIE and develop overhead to fund the entire project.” 

O’Dwyer’s bid of €20 million was successful and after a “long and lengthy process planning permission was obtained for two hotels of 450 bedrooms on the two sites including a bridge link.” 

O’Dwyer felt the combined hotels could go to 500 rooms if the design was only slightly reconfigured making it one of the largest in Dublin. “Liam had an incredible vision,” Cahill-O’Brien recalled. “He had a design for a sky lounge at the top of the hotel which would have been spectacular.” The financial crash now however was imminent. O’Dwyer’s empire was generating sales of more than €60 million, but his debts were more than €100 million – and the music was about to stop.

‘This is the ebb now’

Siobhan O’Dwyer reflected on what happened next in her eulogy. “In spite of all his success and innovations the tsunami that followed the financial crash of 2008 overwhelmed Liam and he was not able to trade out of it,” she said. “I am deeply saddened that the last 10 plus years of his life were blighted by that event, and he was not able to get as much fun and enjoyment out of his later middle age as he deserved.

“He met those challenges with great fortitude and self-belief that he would recover. At this time, Liam was strongly supported by his life partner and ‘rock’ Mary,” she said. “Without her strength and support life would have been much more difficult for him. Liam was also strongly supported by Des, his brother and partner who consistently invested with him and stayed steadfast behind all Liam’s visions, ideas, and ventures even when he might have preferred not to, and perhaps to have retired a little earlier!”

Cahill-O’Brien said: “I remember Liam showing me an Anglo Irish Bank cheque that was to be used to pay for the development behind Zanzibar. It was huge. I’d never seen so many noughts.”

“We just couldn’t conceive that a bank could bust. Liam had spent ten years assembling and developing this project and then overnight it was gone.”

O’Dwyer’s businesses were still generating sales of tens of millions of euros. He wasn’t overly leveraged in normal times but this was the worst financial crash since 1929. 

Ireland’s banks were on the point of collapse themselves, so they revalued O’Dwyer’s assets downwards allowing them to take control of them. It was impossible to refinance his bars and hotels as Ireland went bust and entered a European Union and IMF bailout. 

O’Dwyer had paid more than €20 million to CIE to buy land at the back of Zanzibar to build his new hotel on. His banks told him to ask CIE for this money back, but CIE declined to. 

“If Liam hadn’t done Zanzibar maybe he could have survived,” Brady said. “Liam said to me: ‘In hindsight, a more savvy person than me would have just turned it all into another car park rather than trying to create something.’ Liam’s vision for a 500-bed hotel was special. The design had a huge wow factor with a big atrium turning something that was run down into something very special.” 

O’Dwyer, according to Brady, was courteous and calm even when things went wrong. 

O’Dwyer watched as the Trinity Capital Hotel was sold by Nama for just €25 million in the aftermath of the crash. The 195-bedroom four-star city centre hotel yards from Trinity College today is worth north of €100 million.  

In 2009 a receiver was put into four of his bars Cafe en Seine, Howl at the Moon, Zanzibar, and The George. The bars were sold for a fraction of their value once the economy normalised. O’Dwyer watched as his life’s work was sold off, and others made millions selling the businesses he created. He could have repaid everything if he had been given the time. He had paid tens of millions in taxes and and employed thousands of people but this no longer counted.

“It was dreadful,” Brady said. “A lesser man would have collapsed. Liam had an ability not to get personally caught up in stuff. He wasn’t interested in money really, what motivated him was the excitement of creating a new project.” 

Cahill-O’Brien found it hard to see his friend losing his entire business. “Guys were coming into Ireland and offering 10 cent in the euro for prime assets, but Liam was only allowed to pay the full amount. The Irish guys who made all these places were wiped out. It felt like asset stripping, because that’s what it was.”

Brady said O’Dwyer was philosophical about losing everything. “Liam would always go on about the ebb and flow of life. ‘This is the ebb now Oli,’ he’d say. ‘It tears me apart to go walk by places I built and think about all the work that went in. I need to go forward.’”

‘Liam brought Ireland to another level’

Liam O’Dwyer lost his fine home on Northumberland Road and moved into a more modest property. Over five years ago, he was determined to get going again and started to advise Eamon Waters, who had become a near billionaire from his business Panda Waste. 

Waters wanted to diversify his business interests and O’Dwyer and his former commercial director in Capital Bars, Aidan Corcoran, helped him. In 2015 Waters bought the Grafton Capital Hotel and its Break for the Border superpub for €12m. O’Dwyer advised him on how to redevelop a site he knew intimately. When Waters bought other sites including one on Ship Street in Dublin 8, again O’Dwyer advised him. Another property O’Dwyer had an interest in was on Dawson Street with an old missionary church, and he hoped to develop a derelict building on Pembroke Street into a hotel. 

His relationship with Waters ended not long after the pandemic began in 2020, to O’Dwyer’s surprise. It hurt him, and he felt he had been treated unfairly, but he didn’t say this publicly. 

O’Dwyer was again back at square one. He developed cancer and came through it. 

None of his friends heard him complain, he just picked himself back up. He now walked or took the bus, after once owning a Rolls Royce. 

O’Dwyer had been the biggest person in Dublin nightlife, but now he was on the outside although still respected in many quarters. 

Over the decades, Liam O’Dwyer had collected thousands of books on the best bars and hotels in the world. But after his banks took his home from him O’Dwyer was forced to store them in a shed owned by a friend. Paddy McKillen Jr, the co-founder of Press Group, today Dublin’s biggest hospitality group, asked O’Dwyer if he could buy his book collection. 

O’Dwyer liked McKillen Jr and he was happy for the younger man to have them, as he hoped they might inspire him. It took three van trips to collect all the books. 

The admiration was returned by McKillen Jr.  “Liam was so ahead of his time, he did so much for Irish and Dublin tourism and culture and really helped build the Irish economy at a time when not much was happening in the country. He built an incredible collection of pubs, bars, clubs, and hotels that were very design-led and different from what was on offer at the time,” McKillen Jr said. “Ireland is known for its incredible hospitality and Liam brought that to another level.”

Around September last year, Oliver Brady recalls Liam O’Dwyer telling him over a hamburger in Cinnamon in Ranelagh that he had stuck in a bid, having borrowed the deposit from friends and family, to acquire the former AIB Bank Building at 52-54 Baggot Street after seeing it out the window of a double-decker bus into town.   

O’Dwyer joked to Brady that if he got it, he’d need to move fast to come up with the funding to close the €3.2 million purchase of the building. Just then O’Dwyer’s phone rang so he stepped outside. “You won’t believe this Oli,” O’Dwyer said when he returned. “I won the bid!” 

Brady was delighted for O’Dwyer. “Liam raised the money and started to plan. Everything looked like it was coming together,” Brady recalled. The Enright family, who made their fortune in logistics, agreed to back O’Dwyer and give him a minority stake. O’Dwyer was buzzing with the excitement of creating something new. The plan was to call it The Raglan Townhouse, and a Sri Lankan-themed hotel was being considered. Brady recalls his old friend telling him as they celebrated his winning bid: “This is the flow…” 

*****

Liam O’Dwyer died on February 21, 2023 after his cancer returned. He is sadly missed by his partner Mary, daughters Lorraine, AnnMarie, and Michelle, brother Des, sisters Mary and Siobhan, grandchildren, sons-in-law, nieces, nephews, his wider family and many friends.