I will forever have a fond verdict on Jurys

THE interview went really well. I had been in the penthouse in Jurys Hotel in Ballsbridge for about half an hour chatting to country music legend Emmylou Harris and, unlike some of the famous people I have met over the decades, she was an absolute dote.

When it finished, her tour manager Phil Kaufman said he would escort me to the lobby, and we met there again after Emmylou made a surprise non-singing appearance at a convention for secretaries (we’re talking the Eighties, so it basically felt like a massive hen party). She told me afterwards, rather sweetly, that she was shaking because she never knew what to do with her hands without a guitar in them.

Anyway, the lift doors had barely closed when Kaufman, a colourful character who once hung out with Charles Manson and the Family, and notoriously stole the corpse of Gram Parsons and burned it in the Joshua Tree desert per the singer’s wishes, ferociously broke wind, with an attendant odour the likes of which I had never experienced before, and never wish to again.

Sheepishly, he looked at me, and simply said: ‘It must be all the Guinness.’

The story sprung to mind when I read yesterday that Jurys, which has lain idle for some years now, has finally been approved for purchase by the US State Department Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations and, in a €700million redevelopment programme, it will be demolished, and replaced with a new US embassy and living quarters for US Marine guards stationed here.

Heyday

Another icon finally dies. It’s hard to explain now just how sophisticated Jurys Ballsbridge was in its Seventies and Eighties heyday. The name started life on a hotel where College Green meets Dame Street, and I remember that too, because American relations stayed there once in the late Sixties, and we were scrubbed from head to toe and dressed in our Sunday best to meet them.

That building, a bastion of auld decency, was demolished and replaced by a hideous glass and concrete office block, though thankfully, the bar was sold, dismantled, shipped to Zurich, and reassembled in the James Joyce bar, where it survives to this day.

New Jurys, as it was initially known, was glass and concrete too, but in a more stylish way, with a large outdoor canopy to protect arriving VIPs and locals alike from the rain, a fountain indoors, the vibrant Dubliner bar, and the best feature of all, the Coffee Dock.

It was exotic for the Dublin of the time, not only because it closed for only one hour a day (4am-5am, if my memory serves), but also because, well, for the coffee, which was pretty exotic in itself at the time.

Like thousands of other southside Dubs over the years for whom it became a tradition, I and a gang of friends and our dates called in on the night of our debs in 1980 and I vividly remember arguing with Americans and begging them not to vote for Ronald Reagan in the presidential election that November. That clearly didn’t work.

Over the years, the hotel yielded many personal memories. In 1985, I was holed up there for a couple of days as a member of the panel whittling hundreds of entries for the National Song Contest down to the final six. It was at the height of the Dublin heroin crisis, though we resisted the urge to advance one song which carried the chorus: ‘We’re going back to Nature/ We’re giving pushers flak/ The kids are getting better now/ They’re coming off the smack.’

The ultimate winner was Wait Until The Weekend Comes, sung by Maria Christian and written by Brendan Graham, who went on to win Eurovision Twice, with Charlie McGettigan and Paul Harrington’s Rock’n’Roll Kids and Eimear Quinn’s The Voice. In an amusing aside, Maria Christian, then a teenager but now Maria Cuche, and married to a Frenchman and mother of seven children, made it to the semi-final of The Voice France in 2020.

No sooner had we made our selection than snow started to fall. That very evening, RTÉ was recording a pilot for a new talent show and while the contestants had been in situ all day rehearsing, the chosen judges couldn’t make it, so we were bundled into taxis for the short trip to Montrose, rushed into hair and make-up, and placed front row in studio.

Not expecting that, we had actually retired to the bar and, filled with Dutch courage (maybe literally in the form of Heineken), I might have been too honest in my assessments and, in a more genteel era, my career as an early Simon Cowell never took off.

In 1986, the late Mary MacGoris, who at that stage probably wasn’t much older than I am now but was a formidable doyenne of Irish journalism to 24-year-old me, collared me at the 25th anniversary party for the Peter Mark hairdressing chain in 1986, and took it upon herself to teach me to tango, all the while holding a longstemmed rose clenched between her teeth.

Redevelopment

The funniest night I ever had in the hotel was when, in 1997, Budweiser commandeered the ballroom for a shorts-and-shades party and, to make it more authentic, they covered the ballroom floor in tonnes of sand, dotted with deck chairs, patio tables and parasols.

Of course, the hotel was later sold for redevelopment, to Seán Dunne, who wanted a 37-storey apartment block there, and then, in the wake of the crash, it briefly reopened under the management of John and Francis Brennan as D4 Hotels. Part of it became a supermarket under the stewardship of Dunne’s former wife, Gayle Killilea, and it finally entered and exited Nama before the current plan for the site was announced.

If you were never there, it is hard to convey the excitement of Jurys. It was the nexus of so much of Dublin life, entertainment (the legendary cabaret with Hal Roach ran forever), sport (with Lansdowne just down the road), media events, and just plain old accommodation (even though the reception was elsewhere, it is where I spent the first night of my married life).

So, my memories of this iconic hotel, some happy, some bittersweet, endure.

It might be sad and forlorn now, and few if any will miss the lumpen aspect of it gazing glumly onto Pembroke Road when it is pulled down, but its heyday will forever remain a gleaming piece of a nascently modern Dublin, sprinkled with pixie dust in an era woefully short on it.