Has Jay Bourke finally run out of ideas?
He’s been behind some of the country’s most popular ventures since the age of 22 but as the entrepreneur faces bankruptcy, many are left wondering...
FOR more than three decades, the sight of Jay Bourke cycling through the streets of Dublin, his russet-coloured hair flapping in the breeze, has been a familiar one. Straight-backed on his city bike, he often stops to chat to those he comes across on the short route into town from his home in Rathmines.
Usually, they’re people who used to work for him, at one of the many popular bars, restaurants or nightclubs that he owned with his former long-term business partner, one-time DJ Eoin Foyle.
Many credit the duo with helping to change the face of Dublin’s social scene and introducing, among other things, a previously unknown brunch culture, so upcoming young professionals could afford to eat decently cooked Eggs Benedict while listening to acid jazz in cool surroundings.
They were a new breed of Irish hostelry owners. They were ludicrously young for a start — Bourke was just 22 when he got a loan in 1989 of over €60,000 to set up his first business in Rathmines, a burger joint called Wolfman Jacks.
Their hip bars and restaurants targeted an increasingly solvent cohort of youngsters, no longer forced to emigrate to find work. Rí-Rá nightclub, the Café Bar Deli, Eden and Odessa restaurants, The Globe, The Market Bar, The Front Lounge, Pygmalion and Gubu are just a selection of their ventures based in Dublin. There were others in Cork, Sligo and London.
At a time when wearing a pair of runners or an earring often meant being refused entry into a bar or club, they offered a host of cooler places to go for the more unconventional middle-classes. Bourke once tried to explain their knack for knowing where people wanted to eat and drink.
‘[Foyle] used to come to my restaurant and I used to dance in his clubs. We were a perfect match,’ he said. ‘At that time there was a demand for something not cliched or conservative. People wanted a local that was a bit more openminded. We were lucky. We were in the right place at the right time.’
By 2006, the more overt Bourke had branched into television and for a couple of seasons co-fronted RTÉ show The Mentor, giving advice to fledging and struggling businesses.
Within a couple of years, however, his star began to tarnish when it emerged that his company, Sherland Entertainments Ltd, neglected to pay the Revenue €158,000. At the time Bourke, always noted for his innate selfconfidence, insisted it needed to be seen in the context of the size of the business.
‘It was just a mistake, you know. We are turning over so much money,’ he explained. ‘I have no sense of shame about it. None. I’m not even embarrassed.’
Since then, it’s been an ongoing series of highs and lows for the bolshie 55-year-old entrepreneur, culminating this week in the news that he is now facing the prospect of bankruptcy after his application for a personal insolvency arrangement (PIA) that would write off a debt of €12.2 million was dismissed by the High Court.
Bourke’s total debts come to €13.7 million and a deal put forward by his personal insolvency practitioner was objected to by his main creditor, Pepper Finance Corporation, which is owed almost €12.3 million.
Under the proposed deal it would have recouped just €65,000 and argued that the arrangement was unfairly prejudicial to its interests, that it would get a better financial return if Bourke was declared bankrupt.
With his application for a PIA dismissed, a bankruptcy petition filed by the Revenue Commissioners against Bourke in January can now be heard. It’s believed he is
He did Dublin’s hospitality scene a great service
likely to lose his €1.4 million home on Leinster Road in Rathmines.
Bourke is undoubtedly used to having his finances raked over so publicly. There have been several court appearances over the years and in 2017 he was disqualified from acting as a company director after the liquidation of his Shebeen Chic pub on South George’s Street.
But through it all he seemed to remain unapologetically optimistic that he could turn things around. And quite often he did, for a short time. There were more successful bars launched, like Pantibar and Penny Lane Café.
But there was also Bellinter House, the luxury boutique hotel in Co Meath from which much of his debt now stems. But more on that particular project later.
As his empire shrank, so did his profile. It wasn’t until August 2020 that he hit the headlines again when videos from the popular Dublin city bar, Berlin D2, emerged on social media showing staff and punters flagrantly flouting the strict social distancing rules in place at the time.
A clip of a barman standing on a counter pouring a bottle of spirits into customers’ mouths, while people were seen dancing inside, went viral. Bourke, a shareholder and manager — although he was in Cork on holidays when the video was filmed — initially insisted, in typical ebullient form, that it was just ‘30 seconds of madness’.
The backlash, especially on social media, was vicious and prolonged. Indeed, it seems to be one of the few times that Bourke was left shaken by public opinion.
‘It has affected me,’ he admitted in an interview shortly afterwards with the Sunday Independent. ‘I am upset about all the trolling, I really am. I’m deeply upset by it. I haven’t thought my way through it yet. I f**king hate the trolling. It’s awful. It’s hateful. You hate me because some barman jumped on a bar and made an eejit of himself for 20 seconds? Even though I was involved in running a good show?
‘I have never experienced it before. Perhaps the hate is about people being so frustrated and annoyed with the lockdown. Or because I went to St Columba’s, or Trinity, or something like that. That I’m an object of hate?’
Now that the dust has settled, it’s clear Bourke is not ‘an object of hate’.
Indeed, most of the people the Irish Daily Mail spoke to this week admitted to feeling a certain amount of sympathy for the fatherof-two and his ongoing financial travails, pointing out how he did Dublin’s hospitality scene a great service for a time, introducing some well-loved and still much-missed bars and restaurants.
Others, however, spoke of how ‘frustrating’ he could be to do business with — especially if you were waiting on bills to be paid.
‘He could take his time,’ one former supplier explains. ‘There were times I had to refuse to make any new deliveries until previous bills were cleared. He often pushed things and played stupid games, which would annoy you.
‘In this trade you’re used to pushing for payment, but with Jay you sometimes got the impression he thought he was a bit cleverer than he was, like he could charm you and fob you off until you’d just go
away. I found that very frustrating.’ The second eldest of four children, Bourke was raised in Dalkey on Dublin’s southside and went to school at the ultraexclusive, coeducational St Columba’s College, where other alumni include actress Victoria Smurfit, U2’s Adam Clayton and former politician and broadcaster Ivan Yates. His mother Margaret, who died in early 2020, moved to Ireland with her family from Germany in the 1930s, while his father John Paget Bourke, a cousin of former president Mary Robinson, was a successful banker and businessman, and onetime chairman of Irish Permanent. Bourke studied economics and psychology at Trinity College, where he shared rooms with his good friend, the economist and podcaster David McWilliams. After graduating, and rather incongruously, there was a brief stint as a model in New York for Ralph Lauren. When he returned to Ireland, he got a loan and opened Wolfman Jacks before meeting Eoin Foyle, who was to become his business partner for 15 years. Their first venture was The Globe in 1993, swiftly followed by the nightclub Rí-Rá, which was an instant hit. Then came the Front Lounge, Gubu and Odessa. ‘We just kept opening things and building things,’ Bourke has said. ‘We were having a great time really. ‘At that time there was a palpable joy in the city. There was a freedom and a fun that hadn’t been in Ireland before.’ It was around this time, in 1994, he met his wife, Sarah Harte, in the Kitchen Nightclub, part of U2’s Clarence Hotel in Temple Bar. Harte grew up in Cork, where her family ran the well-known Farmgate restaurant in the English Market. Bourke was clearly smitten with the then lawyer and eager to impress, once turning up at her office on Custom House Quay in a speedboat ‘waving up from the water’.
‘He was like James Bond,’ she has revealed. ‘I had to climb down the long ladder in my high heels and short skirt. We got to Dun Laoghaire in 10 minutes.
‘Jay’s spontaneity, the very thing that attracted me to him at in the first place, is also the thing that can drive me mad,’ she added. ‘Because while it has given me loads of laughs, it can be a little less wonderful when I’m trying to organise something tedious on a rainy Monday.’
They were married in Dunkettle House, Cork, in 1996 and have one son, Conn, now in his early 20s and living in France. Bourke also has an older daughter, Sibéal, from a previous relationship.
When Conn was five years old, Harte gave up her job as a corporate lawyer and began to write fiction and work as a journalist. She’s had two best-selling novels, won several awards for her short stories and in 2021 was appointed to the literary peer panel of The Arts Council of Ireland.
But while her career has steadily taken off, her husband’s has been erratic, to say the least. When releasing one of her books in 2011, Harte gave an emotional interview to this paper, revealing some of the toll his various financial issues had taken. ‘It has been very stressful but a lot of people in this country are having a much worse time than us,’ she said.
‘With regard to Jay, there’s no question that he’s been through a very hard time and that’s been really difficult for both of us.
‘But I don’t think he’s deserving of any sympathy because he’s an entrepreneur and he has to live by the sword and die by the sword. He took risks, and now we have to live up to them.’
She also pointed out that Bourke had faced up to much of his debt along the way.
‘He’s here, he hasn’t left the country,’ she said. ‘He sold everything he can sell, he’s paid back a whack of his debt and he is continuing to pay down his debts.
‘He hasn’t fled, he’s not some guy who’s gone off to top up his tan,’ she added. ‘I’m making the point that we’re not deserving of any sympathy but that he’s doing what he should be doing.
‘But there’s a perception that there’s an amorphous group of people who are managing not to suffer for the risks they took, but that’s not true. I’m just tired of the perception that “your man is one of those”. Our lives have changed massively — but so they should change. I was with him for the good times and now I’m with him for the bad times, that’s how I feel about it.’
‘I’ve changed as a person after the last few years and I think Jay has as well. I think you lose your mental freedom because you’re constantly under stress and pressure. You’re always thinking and worried about things.’
It was a telling glimpse into the strains put on their marriage. One by one the Café Bar Delis closed down, the outlet in Bewleys on Grafton Street losing a huge amount of money. Pubs in Sligo, Cork and London lost more money and had to close.
But Bourke kept going and was very vocal about the unlevel playing field for the hospitality sector during the recession, and how some landlords weren’t feeling their fair share of pain. He pointed out how difficult things were made for his hugely popular Eden Restaurant in Temple Bar.
‘In 2006, the rent went from €65,000 to €145,000, and sales plummeted by 40 per cent. [Eden] is now derelict,’ he once explained, blaming the rent review for destroying ‘a great debt-free, award-winning restaurant’.
Personal and company tax debts saw a number of judgement orders registered against him between 2010 and 2018, including one for Temple Bar Cultural Trust (TBCT), and one for ACC Bank, which was owed €1 million, both of which he paid back.
But it was the fallout of Bellinter House that saw his debts truly spiral out of control. A Palladianstyle Georgian mansion near Navan in Co Meath, it was bought by Bourke, Foyle and the late entrepreneur and Electric Picnic promotor John Reynolds in 2003 for close to €3million.
Opened as a boutique hotel in 2006 after a reported €16 millionplus refurbishment, by 2010 Foyle had left the business and the operating company went into liquidation. It was sold in 2016 for around €3 million. Bourke was left with ‘contingent debt’ arising from personal guarantees. This week, despite his efforts to reach a ‘debt deal’, he faces bankruptcy.
While some, especially on social media, have hailed the decision as his ‘just desserts’, others point out how much employment he provided down through the years, and his flair for knowing how to draw the crowds.
‘He gave jobs to generations of people,’ says one former employee. ‘And some of his businesses were years ahead of anything else that was happening in Ireland at the time, like Eden in the early days.’
Most recently, Bourke has been doing consulting work for the Dunmore hospitality group, which now owns the Wellington Pub in Baggot Street and Walters pub in Dun Laoghaire.
‘I met him out in Dun Laoghaire about six months ago,’ says the former employee. ‘I’d always have time for him. He brought something new to Dublin, and I saw myself how hard he was willing to work. I know there were other issues, but my experience was that he always paid his staff and himself and Eoin were good employers. I have no idea where it all went so wrong, I think in that business there’s a lot of robbing Peter to pay Paul and you can get caught out.
‘But Jay and Eoin did something creative and different, it was pre Celtic Tiger and all that bling stuff. It was properly cool and Dublin wouldn’t have been the same without them.’
‘He did something different, it was cool’