Monart Destination Spa is one of the most luxurious spas in the world. Yet when you’re driving through Enniscorthy in Co Wexford, you could almost miss the entrance. Closed gates, with little visible behind them, slip off an old country road. The spa is concealed behind them and entry is granted when you declare your presence through a speaker. The drive up to it is breathtaking, taking in lakes, massive lawns and a forest that cloaks Vinegar Hill where the last battle of the 1798 Rebellion took place.

The house you see on the way to the car park of the hotel existed as far back as that battle and is now part of Monart Destination Spa, named among the top three spa resorts in the world by Condé Nast Traveller. It was an 18th-century wedding present to the son of the county’s high sheriff and the daughter of the Jameson whiskey family.

Entering the house is like stepping into a Jane Austen book. The house, which was passed down through the Cookman family for generations before the Griffins turned it into a hotel, has wide wooden hallways with dim comforting lighting and dark wooden floors, living rooms with engulfing armchairs and bathrooms with giant bathtubs.

“It was a rabbit warren when we got it,” says Liam Griffin, chairperson of The Griffin Group, which owns Monart.

The mood of the place shifts when you enter the glass hallway which leads to the rest of spa expanding on from the old house. It is bright and sleek. It is where I meet the man himself.

Griffin looks sharp in a shirt, bright yellow tie, smart shoes and has glasses hanging around his neck that part in the middle. He is automatically welcoming. Before beginning the interview, we walk out to the lake and he points to the wooden buildings where visitors stay and get pampered. While he talks, a family of ducks can be seen on the lake, the ducklings only a week or two old. The place is bursting with new energy and life.

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The Monart is a “child of the last recession,” says Griffin – a statement that could extend back to the one in the 1980s. This is because the resort benefited from a Celtic Tiger era multi-million-euro system of tax breaks and was rejuvenated as a result.

These tax breaks meant investors could offset almost half of every euro they spend on hotels against any form of income, once wealthy customers flocked to places like Monart for luxury stays.

In 2002, Charlie McCreevy, then finance minister, extended the incentives for two years. Then it was revealed that some millionaires were exploiting them to avoid tax and, consequently, the scheme was amended.

These tax breaks led to a transformation of the hotel industry which ended up being one of the biggest calamities of the crash.

“I’m not saying it to be clever, but collectively, we saw the crash coming. The Fianna Fáil government brought in a very good initiative at the start for tax breaks for development. In principle, it was a good idea, but it was flogged to death and went way beyond its sell-by date. That had the effect of undermining the economy in the end,” says Griffin.

“Mícheál Martin has been waiting to get his chance. He’s now got his chance. He has to adopt a completely different attitude than when he was trying to make the chance. He is now playing senior hurling.”

Liam Griffin

Griffin also worked for Bord Fáilte as standards advisor overseeing grant aid, until McCreevy scrapped this form of support. These schemes eventually led to the introduction of the tax break incentives.

“Grant aid for hotels was a good idea at the time because the product wasn’t up to international standards. But you had to fulfil, first of all, a sanity check on what you were trying to do. That it made sense,” says Griffin.

However, some did not repay the loans they had received as part of these packages, making the situation worse when the recession hit.

“People with grant aid didn’t repay that loan, they just got on with their economics for building the product or developing or extending the existing product,” he says.

This paved the way for American vulture funds to come into Ireland and take over hotels for a fraction of their worth.

“There were hotels in receivership and hotels that were good hotels and very, very good hotels that were caught in the middle of all this maelstrom, and they lost their business. In fact, we ourselves were sold to a vulture fund because the banks could sell your property to a vulture fund irrespective of whether you were performing or not. So at the time that we were sold to a vulture fund, we were performing within the bank framework that we had agreed with the bank,” says Griffin.

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The Griffin Group is now facing another uncertain and difficult time for hospitality. All of its hotels in Ireland are open. The group left Monart Destination Spa for last and opened it on August 3, a fortnight after Irish hotels officially received the green light in the phased reopening of the economy. Hotel Kilkenny and Ferrycarrig Hotel opened first to ease back into operations in the new normal brought about by Covid-19. 

“We held off on opening the Monart because we wanted to see if there were any gremlins in the system in the other two, so that when we got in here, we knew what to do,” says Griffin.

During its first two weeks in business, Monart had guests staying in 20 of the 70 rooms available in the spa hotel. This was then bumped up to 50. The Griffin Group wants to delay getting back to full capacity as, at the moment, the number of customers staying makes the spa experience more comfortable while the country lives with the Covid-19 virus. 

The patriarch of the group says the company has spent a lot of money on modification and PPE to reopen safely in line with the HSE guidelines. 

“I can’t give a figure off the top of my head because it’s ongoing. Therapists have to have masks. All the staff, everybody, including myself, wears a mask. We’re completely compliant with everything that we are supposed to be compliant with,” says Griffin. 

For him, the modifications are not just about getting customers back through the door, but also for the protection of his staff. Monart has been operating since 2005 and some staff have been employed at the spa hotel for years. 

“The reason we’re enthusiastic about doing it right is because we’re in the business a long time and a lot of our staff are with us a long time. They’re family, they’re part of our family, the family team. So from our perspective, we owe it to them and their friends and neighbours to make sure we don’t put them in danger,” says Griffin.

“The next thing is we obviously need to protect our guests. We’ve done that and it has been costly for the Monart,” he adds.

There is little need to worry for the future of Monart during this uncertain time for many in hospitality. Most of the deals are booked out until early next year, with some availability in December of this year. The price of these stays range from €129 to €895.

Relaxation in the Covid era

Screens between the relaxation rooms, a limited number of people using the saunas, caldariums [a room with a hot plunge bath] and salt grottos, spa therapists wearing both a visor and a mask – these are just some of the modifications implemented in Monart to ensure customer safety.

“We’ve tried to turn anything we have to do into a positive. So we changed a few systems in rooms, so that it is actually a better experience for the guest now since before Covid. We try to look at it imaginatively,” says Griffin.

“Funnily enough it’s gone down well and the customer has been delighted with it because, you must remember, psychologically, the customers have changed. That’s what I have noticed.”

Liam Griffin

Landing in this situation while you’re away on a spa break may have seemed like something from a sci-fi movie only a year ago. Now, if these precautions weren’t there, customers might feel uneasy and exposed to contracting the virus.

“Funnily enough it’s gone down well and the customer has been delighted with it because, you must remember, psychologically, the customers have changed. That’s what I have noticed,” says Griffin.

“When you walked around the hotel the day before you were due to open and you started visualising what the customer was going to face, you were thinking, ‘Janey Mac, that’s a real negative’, or ‘This is really off-putting’, and so forth. But the customers are looking at this in a completely different way than they looked at it before. They’re now looking for safety,” he adds. 

Not only is there a change in the mindset of customers – many are eager to spend money to get away from work and home life and relax. Most are now happily accepting the precautions needed to stop the spread of the virus so they can do this.

“It’s the same as playing hurling or football. I’m glad to play, but I wish there was a crowd. The human mind will always settle on the lowest common denominator, whatever the hell it is,” says Griffin.

Not playing ball

“The biggest problem that we would have is a lot of people are not doing the right thing. And that’s actually disgraceful, to be honest with you,” says Griffin.

Most places of Ireland have been largely compliant with reopening. Some, however, have not, and most pubs have yet to be given a chance.

“The ‘cute hoor’ syndrome is still in Ireland. You’ll never get the Irish out of Ireland, that’s my opinion. We should be supporting the people who are doing it right and we shouldn’t be supporting the people who are not doing it right.”

Liam Griffin

The most recent example was the infamous brunch at Jay Bourke‘s Dublin restaurant and bar Berlin D2. This incident happened after Liam Griffin and I sat down to talk, yet he believes there are a few establishments, not just in hospitality, that are not playing by the rules in the country.

“The ‘cute hoor’ syndrome is still in Ireland. You’ll never get the Irish out of Ireland, that’s my opinion. We should be supporting the people who are doing it right and we shouldn’t be supporting the people who are not doing it right,” says Griffin.

“If you want to support people who are not doing it right, you really are adding to the problem. And you’re adding to the possibility that the people who are doing it right will now have to close. And I say that’s how the Kildare people feel, the Laois people feel and the Offaly people feel at this moment in time,” says Griffin. These three counties are still in a localised Covid-19 lockdown as we meet. 

Griffin used the meat factory scandal as an example. The working conditions in a Kildare meat factory led to the county’s recent lockdown. Now, small businesses, especially in hospitality, in the area are teetering on a knife-edge because people can’t go in and out of the county. 

If this happens to more counties, Griffin believes it will have a huge impact on rural Ireland.

Branching out into the UK

Last year, the Griffin Group branched out into the UK to create a sister spa to Monart in The Duchy of Cornwall, the estate of The Prince of Wales. Prince Charles wanted to build a new sustainable town on his estate just outside of Dorset, in a place called Poundbury. 

“They built houses there that are more expensive than others. But it doesn’t look like that, the way they’ve done it,” says Griffin. 

The Prince was looking to set up a spa in his designer village and met with various candidates for the job. Griffin’s two sons, Liam and Michael, who are now director and CEO of The Griffin Group respectively, were among the chosen few. 

“We were invited to tender for this. We were looking at things like Brexit as well,” Liam says.

“If we get a foot in England at a reasonable rate, as long as it doesn’t hurt the main business, we’ll have a go at it. So, we had a go at it and to our astonishment, to be quite honest with you, we were selected as the people to do it,” he adds.

The Griffin Group was allowed to design the entire building for the Poundberry project and Griffin says this was crucial as to whether they would have got on board. 

“If we’d been given a design, we wouldn’t have done it. So, we were able to design the whole building inside,” he says.

“We’re in England now. We’ll see where it takes us. It’s a calculated gamble, that’s what it is but it makes a lot of sense,” Griffin adds. 

“He [Prince Charles] has a great grá for Ireland. He actually said to the boys [his sons] that he was very, very happy that we got it,” he says. “He calls them ‘the boys’,” Griffin jokes as he puts on a posh accent. 

He shows me a photo of Prince Charles with his sons while he was visiting Monart. He says they gave him a whole tour of the place. They pointed out the changing rooms and toilets which were located on the bottom floor and he said he wanted to see them.

“So he went in and he said, ‘I want to use your facilities.’ He came back and he said, ‘Well, I can tell you that that works. It’s all very good’,” says Griffin while laughing. “He’s a gas man as well,” he adds. 

Griffin goes back to the photos he was showing me a moment ago. He tells me about each of the family members. “That’s Michael and that’s his wife. She’s actually Malaysian. That’s his daughter and that’s his son,” he says while pointing at each of the faces on the photo on his phone. 

“Fluent in Irish, both of these [he says about his grandchildren]. The two of them talk in Irish when neither Michael, myself or their granny can speak it,” he adds. “And that’s Liam [he points to his other son] and that’s his wife, and she’s Finnish and all their kids all speak Finnish.” 

Looking at his family, it prompts me to ask about the future of The Griffin Group legacy. Griffin took it over from his parents, his sons are now doing the same. Does he think it will always be a family business? 

A family legacy

Griffin’s father was a guard from Co Clare who came to Wexford and married a farmer’s daughter from north Wexford. He was then transferred to Rosslare Strand because the Gardaí could not be within 30 miles of their own home, Griffin explains. 

“My grandfather, my mother’s father, died when she was 12 and they had a fine farmhouse and a fine farm with 100 acres of land, which at that time was a lot, and a nice house. An old house, three or four stories high, traditional good quality country farmhouse,” says Griffin. 

After de Valera started an economic war with Britain, as Griffin puts it, his family started a guest house.

His mother Jenny had a business bone in her body. “She’s a real entrepreneur,” he adds with pure admiration in his voice. While she was operating the guest house, she also had a side hustle. She started a knitwear business and she secured all the contacts with all the schools in Wexford for uniforms.

“She had machines going in our house. The machines became automatic in time and my dad finished the garments when he came in and we packed them up,” says Griffin.

This dogged work ethic instilled in her son would later contribute to the reason he left a promising career in playing unpaid amateur sport to carry on the hotel business. 

“The biggest thing I love is sport and the next thing I love is hotels. And they don’t mix. They didn’t mix then anyway.”

Liam Griffin

Then his mother and father, who was retiring at the time, decided to buy a small hotel in Rosslare, which had been up for sale for years, in 1960. Griffin would decide to buy it off his parents in 1976.

“I started in that hotel at 12. My first job was carrying slates up to my Dad on the roof. It wasn’t a great job to be doing, to be honest with. He could be dropped in jail for it tomorrow,” he says jokingly. “He was a great character.”  

“We built up that business and then we moved on and we bought a Hotel Kilkenny and then we bought Ferrycarrig Hotel and subsequently went onto Monart. We sold Rosslare in 1999,” he adds.

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Griffin’s love for the hotel business is clear as he talks a mile a minute about the business he grew up in. So too is his love for hurling. Especially when he drops hurling analogies into conversations, regardless of what we’re talking about. At some points during this interview, I wasn’t sure if I was talking to an All-Ireland winning manager or a renowned hotelier. 

“The biggest thing I love is sport and the next thing I love is hotels. And they don’t mix. They didn’t mix then anyway,” says Griffin. His dedication to sport even led to him losing a kidney.

He said doing the two simultaneously could be toxic. He gave the example of when he was working in the hotel from 6am and finished at 12pm. He then got into his car, drove to the match, played and then went home and was back working at 6pm. This would be one of the more forgiving shifts. Sometimes he would be working until 3am and still have to play a match the next day. 

“I was crying half the way to Switzerland because I suddenly realised, my career of hurling and football is really over.”

Liam Griffin

Yet, if Griffin wasn’t in the hotel pub on a Saturday night pulling pints he “would have had fancy notions,” he says. Despite this physically gruelling lifestyle, it worked for Griffin. 

“I’m not a great drinker, in fact I’m a very limited drinker. But I enjoyed the atmosphere,” he says.

Before he attended Shannon School of Hotel Management, Griffin was on every Co Wexford gaelic football and hurling team he could play on, except the senior teams, before he reached his 19th birthday. 

“I was doing my Leaving Cert while on the county intermediate team,” he says while beaming, adding that he was a sub on two All Ireland-playing teams by the time he was 21. 

“Out of loyalty to my parents was the reason I went to Shannon. Because they had done so much for us,” he says. 

Even while in Co Clare learning the hospitality trade, he joined a team and still continued to play. After seeing his potential, the senior team selectors had arranged for Griffin to finish his hotel training in Ennis in Co Clare. His mother, however, did not allow it. 

Griffin played for Co Clare during the 1968 Minor Hurling Championship against Waterford and was on the winning side. The following Sunday, Griffin was on a plane to Switzerland to finish is hotel training and honouring his mother’s wishes.

“I was crying half the way to Switzerland because I suddenly realised, my career of hurling and football is really over,” says Griffin.

Griffin knew after he completed his coursework in Switzerland that he would have to do another year of training in England. By then, he would be out of the game too long to get back once again to the level he had been playing. Later, he got involved with club and county hurling in Wexford which would lead him to bringing a team to All Ireland victory.  

Although it was a decision made out of loyalty, Griffin says he never regretted it, despite having to give up what he loved doing the most – playing sport. 

“I regretted it because I lost a sporting career as I saw it, but I never regretted doing the business because I did love the business and I still do. It’s a great business, like,” says Griffin.

“Where the hell else are you going to be able to get up in the morning and discuss architecture, wine, interior decoration?” he asks. 

Griffin then reverts back to the issue of family legacy for The Griffin Group and is optimistic that it will be carried on, particularly because of the changing nature of the work. 

“From my point of view, my parents started a business, I came in behind them, I’ve worked my guts out, my guys are working in a different way than I worked. I had to do a lot of the coalface work,” says Griffin. 

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Although Griffin’s situation was different, where he had to leave the county to pursue his career and therefore could not continue playing GAA at the same time, he says that finding career opportunities is difficult when you play GAA.

“Most become teachers. Even if they don’t want to be,” says Griffin. Teaching allows you free time in the evening, weekends off, holidays during Easter and Christmas and two to three months off during the summer In other words, a lot of time to train while earning a living.

Fixtures are the problem here, according to Griffin. Too many matches are being scheduled in close proximity with each other, which puts huge pressure on players and does not give them freedom to look into what they want to do with their lives outside of sport.

Griffin is a staunch believer that the GAA should remain an unpaid voluntary amateur sport, however he insists the scheduling of games needs to be addressed.

The wrong side of the All-Ireland

Despite having to give up his dreams of playing sport, Griffin enjoyed success as the manager for the Wexford Senior Hurling team and led them to the greatest victory in the GAA – winning the All-Ireland Championship in 1996. 

However, Griffin says he was on the wrong side of winning the Liam McCarthy Cup and said he would have preferred to have been playing on the pitch. 

Despite his love for the GAA, he does not see and All-Ireland happening this year, especially when the atmosphere of a packed Croke Park on championship day will not be possible as long as Covid-19 remains in the country.

Taoiseach Mícheál Martin, however, expressed his view on the RTÉ Radio 1’s show Today with Claire Byrne that he would like to see an All-Ireland Championship happen this year.

“We want the championship to go ahead. I want an All-Ireland this year. I think it would be a symbol that a country is fighting this virus, that it’s not going to surrender to it,” says Martin.

The need to be competitive

Griffin believes many of the issues facing hospitality right now are looked at through a Dublin lens. 

“Take the Vat for example, Vat was brought up because Dublin hotels were supposed to be getting so much money. But some fella down in Courtmacsherry wasn’t getting that kind of money. Or some fella in Malin Head wasn’t getting that kind of money,” says Griffin.

The Vat issue has been a contentious one before Covid-19 hit the country and many restaurants were shuttered for good as a consequence. Other victims of high Vat rates include hotels. 

“I think we are now back up into the highest level of Vat in the EU. That’s further exacerbated by the fact that Britain has come down to five per cent,” says Griffin. The UK cut its hospitality Vat rate from 20 per cent in response to the pandemic. Ireland’s currently stands at 13.5 per cent.

“I believe Vat should come back down to 9.5 per cent where it was and should stay there,” says Griffin. He adds that becoming more competitive should be a high priority for the government now.

“This is a serious, serious situation and qualified, serious people need to be making sure that these things happen.”

Liam Griffin

“Can an island off Europe stand alone with higher charges before it starts to cost out its product in tourism terms? And the answer is absolutely not. Ireland needs to be competitive on every measure, not just on Vat, on every measure. On rates and on insurance, which we’re paying out four times more than Britain,” says Griffin.

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Insurance claims in Ireland have become a scandal in the last few years, yet Griffin still believes there is a responsibility to pay up when there is justified negligence.

“If somebody has a legal claim because of somebody else’s negligence, they’re entitled to get paid. Because then there’s rumours that someone doesn’t want to pay. I want to pay. If someone gets damaged in my place and it’s our fault, they should get paid,” he says. 

While this may be the mentality of many people, especially in hospitality, it does not extend to so-called compo culture with people suing while it seems no one was at fault. The most high-profile such case was when Fine Gael TD Maria Bailey tried to sue the Dean Hotel after falling off a swing at the establishment. The story eventually led to Bailey’s resignation.  

“Maria Bailey lost, in fairness to her. She’s the Padraig Pearse of payments because she brought it to the fore. She has lost her career and her status and everything else and I feel sorry for her on the one hand, but it was a disgraceful thing to do on the other,” says Griffin.

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Griffin’s view of government is pessimistic and one that has been formed after many let-downs. Griffin was a hotelier before, during and after the financial crash of 2008 when one in six Irish hotel rooms was under the direct control of a bank. 

“It’s very hard to have faith in any government. Modern democracy is under serious pressure. All you have to do is look around the world. People are much better informed today than they were years ago and this thing of making it up at the crossroads is gone,” says Griffin.

“I’m not an economist, but as far as I can see, the economy would go into total collapse if that happens.”

Liam Griffin

It may feel like déjà vu for some hoteliers as the situation is somewhat similar to that in 2008. Ireland now has a Fianna Fáil coalition with the Green Party and Fine Gael, while hurtling towards a recession with those in hospitality in the eye of the storm.

It is early days for Minister Catherine Martin who was assigned the tourism brief, and Griffin has chosen to stay on the bench for now before passing judgement on whether she is right for the role.

“To be fair to her, I can’t prejudge her. She may be a genius. She may have a fantastic emotional intelligence. But my problem would be that sometimes the politicians might have emotional intelligence, but it’s trumped by their political decision-making and their political manoeuvring,” says Griffin.

“The lady in New Zealand [Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern] knows how to lead by the look of things. She’s a woman and she thinks differently than men. It’s interesting to see that. You can say what you like about Margaret Thatcher, but by God, she was a strong woman. Be she right or be she wrong, and she was wrong on lots of things, and she was wrong in relation to Ireland as well, but at the same time, she was a strong leader. Angela Merkel is a strong leader. Then look at Donald Trump and Boris Johnson and I rest my case,” he adds. 

He was quicker to give veiled criticism of Taoiseach Mícheál Martin.

“Mícheál Martin has been waiting to get his chance. He’s now got his chance. He has to adopt a completely different attitude than when he was trying to make the chance. He is now playing senior hurling. He needs to win the ball and he needs to strike it fairly often and he needs to make sure that all the lads are pulling their weight,” says Griffin. 

The government in the past few months has been praised for its approach to tackling the virus, but patting politicians on the back may not be a good thing to do, according to Griffin.

“We’re starting to get really complimentary about ‘doing the right thing.’ That’s dangerous,” he says.

Griffin would like to see a few changes brought in by this government that would help hospitality survive. One would be a tourist city tax off a hotel room bill, which exists in other European countries. One thing he does not want to see changed is the wage subsidy schemes that are currently in place to help employers and employees hit by job cuts during Covid-19.

“There’s no way it will be gone by next summer,” says Griffin. “We need it until at least next summer after we see where everything is going. And you’d want to have a guarantee of that, because how are you going to deal with your banks if you don’t have a guarantee of that?”

Currently, there are plans to stop it in April 2021. “I’m not an economist, but as far as I can see, the economy would go into total collapse if that happens,” he adds.