Billionaire Lyons planning tearooms for hip Dublin 8
WITH Diageo now making moves to develop the unused part of its St James’s Gate site, we can expect lots more activity in the Dublin 8 area.
The postcode has already been popular with the hipsters for some time with hotels, restaurants and plenty of other enterprises seeking to cash in on its growing popularity. But there are still plenty of parts of Dublin 8 ripe for gentrification — as any tourists making their way down to the Storehouse can attest.
Billionaire Pearse Lyons has already developed a distillery in the area and will go about upgrading some neighbouring buildings. He plans to upgrade 117 to 120 James’s Street, demolishing some less wellfinished extensions and amalgamating four buildings and refurbishing them. Vacant units, most recently a hairdressers, offices and bedsits, will be given quite a step up in the world as they will be used, in part, for tearooms under the plan.
The boom, Bertie Ahern once said, is getting boomer, or was it boomier?
Either way, the boom was back in bucket-loads last Friday afternoon at the Intercontinental — formerly the Four Seasons for those who can’t keep up with the capital’s ever-changing hotel names.
No less than 500 corporate titans, bubbly in hand, teemed into the Intercontinental for the Institute of Directors annual Christmas lunch where they were given a festive welcome by IOD chair Michael Somers. With the Brexit deal in hand earlier that morning, the atmosphere was light bordering on dizzy as the crowd was regaled by comedians Barry Murphy (he of the German alter ego Gunther) and Colm O’Regan of Irish Mammies fame.
O’Regan specialises in taking his audiences to the edge and sometimes over it. But one quip that went down particularly well was that one about the definition of negative equity — where your home is more valuable than your bank. Oh, how we laughed at that. Well, just about.