![]() ![]() He knew shame and was aware of how fortune had ultimately smiled on him. He had suffered his own trauma and learned from it slowly, painfully. But he did have humility, he was well liked and he was capable of the kind of empathy that is often beyond the very wealthy and very powerful. If it wasn’t for his redeeming features, Dunne could have been a very unpopular figure in Irish life. He never saw his role in funding Haughey’s lifestyle as corrupt. He went on to have a second life in business after Dunnes Stores, opening a chain of gyms that brought low-cost fitness to the masses just as his father had brought low-cost groceries. Through his eyes it was entirely transactional, a businessman making a decision just as his father had done so in paying a ransom to his kidnappers. ![]() He was just helping a man who needed a dig out. There’s no point in saying you would change something, you have to get on with life and learn from it and laugh at it. “I gave him money and you have to get on with your life,” he told Miriam O’Callaghan. He never accepted the verdict but the reality was that he had played a role in ensuring that the elected leader in a democracy was a kept man, in hock to wealthy interests.īen Dunne had no regrets about funding Haughey. The main one, presided over by Judge Michael Moriarty, found that Dunne was corrupt. Two tribunals ensued at which Dunne was a major figure. Irish Examiner Archive, Thursday, May 25, 2000. That in turn led to the unmasking of Haughey as having received over €8m in donations from various wealthy interests in the course of his political career.īen Dunne leaving Dublin Castle after giving evidence before the Moriarty Tribunal. They ousted him from Dunnes Stores and in doing so filed legal papers which alleged he had given huge sums of money to Charles Haughey. The fallout from that episode ensured that Wojcik would go down in history as having played a major role in rooting out a culture of corruption that had persisted for decades.ĭunne’s sister Margaret Heffernan and brother Frank were appalled at the publicity around Florida, feeling it had dragged the family name into the gutter. That he would attribute his descent to the trauma he suffered from the kidnapping was convenient but was also quite obviously rooted in fact. Once he was released and returned home he gave an interview that was pregnant with humility and regret. The tycoon had consumed enough cocaine to floor a horse. He had just been arrested after an escort he had hired, Denise Wojcik, thought he was going to throw himself off the balcony of his 17th floor hotel room. In that instant, one might well have asked Dunne where it had all gone wrong.Īfter his arrest and release in the US, Ben Dunne gave a tell-all interview that was full of humility and regret. ![]() Nine years later, in February 1992, onlookers in the lobby of the Grand Cyprus Hotel in Florida would have seen a man hogtied to a pole being carried out the door by a number of police officers. In 1983, his father died, having willed him the values and drive to succeed. It was back to work straight away as if nothing had occurred. Once Dunne was freed, there was never any question of taking a moment to pause or reflect. The Government insisted that no ransom be paid but Ben Sr decided he would do what had to be done.Ī ransom was paid, though denied, and arguably the decision to do so prompted the kidnapping a few years later of the supermarket tycoon Don Tidey, also by the IRA. And when it occurred, his father dealt with it in his customary manner. He would be the next Ben Dunne.īy the time he was kidnapped he was well on the way. He didn’t apply himself all that much in school, but his future was His own account of growing up reflected a rearing in which all was geared towards furthering the reach of Dunnes Stores. Today, Dunne would be described as having had a privileged childhood based on the material wealth that his father Ben had accumulated. From a young age his father had impressed on him the importance of work, the imperative of running a successful business. Dunne was back at work within a few days. Today, somebody who had experienced that level of terror would seek out counselling to process what had happened and try to come to terms with it. He was 32 years of age at the time, running a huge cross-border business started in Cork by his father, Ben Senior. I didn’t really feel that I was free until I got home a few hours later.”įr Dermod McCarthy, who negotiated Ben Dunne's release from his IRA kidnappers in 1981, with Mary and Ben Dunne just after were reunited. I thought, ‘Good God, they could shoot me and throw the earth back in’. “I looked up and I could see the stars in the sky. “The first thing I did was get into a grave,” Dunne later recalled. ![]()
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