‘Here’s WHIPPING a BOY Let’s get him!’ IT WAS CRUEL...’
Entrepreneur Jay Bourke became a hate figure in Ireland when footage from his Berlin D2 bar went viral. The businessman talks to Barry Egan about that incident, plus the death of his mother this year, his banker dad, and how he met his wife Sarah
‘I am not wealthy at all — I have had a wealth of experience, I have had an adventure. But I am not a rich man’
IT’S 8pm, the appointed time, last Tuesday, and the front door of Jay Bourke’s house in Rathmines is wide open. I ring the bell, twice, maybe three times. No answer. So, I call Jay on his mobile phone. Eventually answering, he is upstairs “doing chores, just fiddling around”. Two minutes later, the Hugh Grant-haired entrepreneur appears smiling in the landing of the big, empty house. His wife Sarah Harte is in West Cork.
We repair to the living room, where Jay pours himself a glass of “Hungarian” wine, plonks himself on the sofa, and crosses one long leg in front of the other. He says he is “bailing, gone”, at 6am the following morning “to get a bit of space. I’m doing a bit of sailing in a competition.”
When I text him the next day expecting to find him on his boat, Dear Prudence, in Dunmore East (where he was last weekend), Jay is actually off on another boat. Though a sailor through and through, Jay may well be doubly enjoying his time away because of a certain regrettable incident in his bar Berlin D2 in mid-August going viral — resulting in Jay receiving hate-mail and the like.
“And I need to get my head together,” he texts me from the boat.
For two hours at home in Rathmines (and 90 minutes the day before), Jay is remarkable in his candour and, at times, charisma. Still, he seems down, which is rare for someone who is usually so jovial and upbeat.
“It has affected me,” Jay says of the incident at the Dublin city centre venue which went viral globally in our new coronavirus world when footage surfaced of the barman pouring drinks into people’s not-very-socially-distanced mouths. “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?”
To lighten the mood, I ask him is he a jumped-up rich kid.
“I am in my arse!” he laughs. “I have never denied my privilege but I am a hard-working f**ker! Come on! I say to people when I see the letters: ‘Please bin!’ I’m not used to it. It’s awful. I think when you open a bar or restaurant, you actually want to please people, make people happy. At the root of it, is that. You want to be liked because you have done a good job.”
Is it more painful psychologically being a people-pleaser when he receives hate on social media?
“I don’t know. This is a new experience for me, to get absolute hate. Anyway, maybe I’ll get over it or time will heal it or something. The clip was viewed 1.1 million times. We closed the bar because we were traumatised by the keyboard warriors who can defame someone without any consequences on the internet. The staff are nervous about it.
“You know, we hear stories about kids being bullied online and we know how much it affects them. And the people who work in the bar are young 20-year-olds. They are young. I am 54, an old f **king relic!” he smiles.
That smile disappears when he talks of his mother Margaret Paffrath, who died in February at the age of 80. “I miss her but I think Mum had taken her exit, if you’d asked her, at the right time. She was a bad asthmatic and she would never have survived Covid-19. She lived a great life, she gave me my moral guidance.”
Jay says his mother had a political sense of humour; having left Cologne in Germany in the late 1930s and moved to Ireland, she would joke at the family dinner table in Dalkey about Donald Trump thus: “I remember a little man with a moustache who got into power and everyone thought he was great. The business community in Germany greatly admired Hitler. He got the economy going.”
“My mother was quite a devout Bavarian Catholic,” says Jay, who is “a complete atheist actually”. Jay’s banker father John is also a jazz pianist. He used to play on Sundays. “We were the audience,” says Jay, adding that his father is “a very mild-mannered man. I never heard a cross word growing up.”
The second-oldest of four children, Jay recalls his childhood as being marked by “day-dreaming and being late for dinner”.
“I was building tree-houses with roofs, making train sets, I was empire-building in my bedroom at eight years of age,” says Jay, who went on, through some well-publicised ups and downs, to build a hospitality empire that began with Wolfman Jack’s in Rathmines but went on to include The Globe, Eden, The Front Lounge, Café Bar Deli, Shebeen Chic, Bellinter House Hotel, Bobo’s Gourmet Irish Burgers, Pygmalion, the Pantibar, the Market Bar, Odessa.
He studied economics and psychology at Trinity. The latter prepared him for the often turbulent journey that lay ahead as an entrepreneur in bars, restaurants and clubs, where public failure can come as quickly as success.
“I think it is interesting when you are put in a difficult situation: do you think the worst or the best? Which bit of your mind is going to protect you from disaster? I mean, ultimately in business when you have a difficult moment, people say, ‘Are you gone?’. What does that mean? Does that mean you’re dead? Or does it mean your business hasn’t worked? Should you be so tied to it?
“Unfortunately, we have seen people whose entire self-image was based upon the business that they had... you know, the profoundly sad sudden deaths that we had with John Reynolds [who died in 2018, aged 52] and Hugh O’Regan [who died in 2012, aged 49]. These men are not alive. The ignominy of a business failure was something that they hadn’t thought about. They were too tied up in their business to realise that they were individuals and all the rest of it, you know?
“So I think when people are deciding on whether they want to be entrepreneurial or not, a lot of the psychology of what it puts you through should be analysed before you do it.”
Jay tried to “contextualise” his own failures. He learned early on that if your business does fail — “it is not the end of you. You are not gone. You just have to move on.”
In America, he says, they call it “scar tissue. And the experience will serve you well. It is an admired thing as opposed to a ridicule thing. Here we have changed our bankruptcy laws from 12 years to one year. It was almost if you went bankrupt you didn’t go to debtors’ jail, but you were an outcast.”
In terms of Jay’s own scar tissue, in 2017 he was disqualified from acting as a company director arising out of the liquidation of Shebeen Chic on South Great George’s Street. Jay feels that being disbarred as a director when the bar was evicted from its premises (“unfairly,” he says) was harsh. “There was a deficit of tax of €84,000 and the judge decided that I had kept the company going beyond an appropriate time. It was technically insolvent and for that I was disbarred for seven years. I didn’t oppose it.”
Why? “Because I couldn’t afford the legal fees,” he says, “also because I didn’t want to. I am quite happy with standing back for the time being. But I think it was incredibly severe. €84,000? When you think about the hundreds of millions that I have collected on behalf of the state. In terms of taxation, if 40 cent of every pound you take goes straight to the government, can you imagine? I probably had about 30 places. They look into your entire history, whatever misdemeanours were along the way.”
What sort of misdemeanours?
“Well, if you were late with a tax return, if a company was struck off. That kind of thing.”
Were there a lot of misdemeanours? “Not a huge amount. Bellinter House [in Meath, which he co-owned with John Reynolds] was liquidated, for example. I didn’t want to do that but I had to. That is just part of life. I am not a corporate banker. But then again, hang on a minute, the banks, the bastions of respectability, how much did they lose the state? €64 billion! Look at the First Nationwide, Michael Fingleton? €5 billion! The way he ran his companies was, to my mind, outrageous. I am only a little minion. They all stick together,” he claims.
Jay can remember going to Anglo and saying, ‘My restaurant chain is worth more than your bank, please stop this!’ “I couldn’t understand their lending,” he says now. “I paid Anglo back. My father said to me, normally commercial property banks go bust when commercial property crashes. He said Anglo is one such bank that will crash. He said that years before it happened.”
“And technically,” Jay adds, “if your company is insolvent, you are breaking the law. How the hell can you be solvent in 2008 or 2020? It is almost impossible. In 2008 the country was insolvent, we couldn’t borrow money on the bond markets. The banks were insolvent. And I’m done for a tiny little restaurant that is insolvent, for seven years?” he laughs.
“Fingleton didn’t get seven years. He was lending money… incredibly reckless. They lent Hugh [O’Regan] €250m to build Kilternan. Hugh is dead now — in my opinion because they lent him too much money. They were almost foaming at the mouth trying to lend him money. Not looking at the business plans, not being professional about it, not being rational about it.
“I think it is desperate what they did to people. But ‘it’s Hugh’s fault’. Is it? I don’t think so. You need regulators, you need people in charge, to put the brakes on. I would have a reasonable idea about bankers from my father…”
Does Jay have regrets?
“Of course I have regrets and yes, I made mistakes. I wouldn’t be human otherwise. What the f **k? Some decisions I just got wrong.”
Like?
“I remember the chain of Café Bar Deli and it was the best proposition in the city. Then suddenly rents and salaries went up and you had to charge more and the proposition changed with price inflation. When I look back on Café Bar Deli I think that I should have kept it as the cheapest place forever. I should have just been obsessed by it, like Michael O’Leary is at Ryanair. I think that was a massive mistake of mine. Michael O’Leary is the utter master of the supply and demand curve; he is a genius.”
He adds: “The newspapers like writing about me. You have to prepare for the slings and arrows.”
And how does he deal with the abuse he is currently getting because of the incident in Berlin D2? “I am extremely upset by it but I will be fine.”
In 1994, Jay met his future wife Sarah in “The Kitchen on a Tuesday,” he says, referring to U2’s nightclub downstairs in The Clarence hotel in Temple Bar.
“She is a force of nature. She doesn’t like me talking about her in the media. She was a very accomplished woman, very academic, very clever, very funny, a beautiful woman. They don’t make them like Sarah every day, I’d say. I was introduced by a friend. He said, ‘Here’s the infamous Sarah Harte.’ It was fun,” laughs the infamous Jay Bourke.
“After that, we started hanging out. I took her to a Donna Summer concert at the Point.”
They were married in Dunkettle House in Cork in 1996. They have one son, Conn. (Jay has a daughter, Sibéal, from a previous relationship.)
Does his wife ever give him advice on his projects. Does he listen? “Of course she has an opinion. But Sarah is a writer” — her books include The Better Half and Thick and Thin — “and writers are probably the most entrepreneurial people of all. They are artists. They take huge risks with their income and their lives. So I really don’t comment on her writing because I am not qualified to do so, but she isn’t much qualified to talk about my stuff either.”
Is he stubborn?
“Very. I am most certainly too stubborn. Everybody, from my father to my wife, says that to me.”
And a bit of a recluse?
“No. I’m more of a loner. I like to go out to sea, there are less people at sea.”
Sarah once told a lovely tale of Jay, in the early days of their courtship, turning up outside her office on Custom House Quay in a speedboat, “waving up from the water. He was like James Bond, and 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, 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.”
Courtesy of the August weather, it is a dark, stormy Tuesday night in Rathmines. There are dark storm clouds brewing inside Jay’s head too.
“I explained and defended the bar and the actions of the barman,” he says. “I asked for a fair hearing. We were condemned before we’d even opened our mouths. That’s an awful thing to do. Simon Harris implied in his tweet that we were killing people. Get out of here! We are not doing anything of the sort. I apologised. It was unsavoury. It was not cool. We need to work together. We need to be communitarian — but that bar has been communitarian. And they are nice people.
“I don’t know Simon Harris. But I think what he tweeted… it was not a proper thing to do, in my view. Maybe I am over-stepping the mark, but that’s what I think. And then the tweet that he tweeted about Golfgate was not nearly as severe — and yet those people ought to know better. They’re grown-ups. And they’re men in power, mostly paid by the state, and paid really, really well. The barman is in his 20s...
“I just think the vitriol was too heavy. The Licensed Vintners Association of Ireland came out and condemned us from on high. It was like, here’s a whipping boy. Let’s go get him. It was cruel. It wasn’t fair.”
How rich is Jay?
“I am not wealthy at all. I’ve had a wealth of experience. I have had an adventure. But I am not a rich man,” he says. “I’m basically a day-dreamer. I do think day-dreaming is really important because you get ideas. I am a sort of an adventurer. It is just the way I am. I have always been like that.”
Some would argue, convincingly, that it was Jay’s day-dreaming up ideas that helped turn Dublin into the modern city that it became. Before The Globe on South Great George’s Street — which he bought in 1993 for £160,000 and sold in 2006 for €6m — Jay says “you couldn’t get into a bar in Dublin if you wore an ear-ring or were in any way outwardly unconventional. The Globe was a moment for that generation.”
The Front Lounge on Parliament Street was, he says, the first bar in Ireland “where gayness was de-segregated”. More than that, Jay says he opened it in 1996 “for my mother”.
“I told her that this was the place where she could sit at a lovely velvet couch and get a cup of tea brought to her on tray and get nice food. It was a little bit posh, a little bit glamorous. She was very proud. My parents also loved Eden,” he says of his much-lamented restaurant in Temple Bar that was as loved by the glitterati as it was by his parents.
“With Eden, for example, we were trying to do something that was modern and Irish. The architect Tom [de Paor] became Irish architect of the year and he is lecturing in Harvard now. Bodega in Cork was really beautiful. The Market Bar in Dublin was a beautiful building too. Ultimately, people like nice things.”
As for the future, Jay believes Dublin’s city centre needs to be re-imagined in light of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We need to work out a way to attract people back. You need to give people a reason to go to your building. I remember in the Pygmalion café in Dublin we won breast-feeding cafe of the year twice in a row. The seating was appropriate for women. They could sit down and be comfortable. So they came in their droves.
“Or like in the Market Bar. I remember on a Saturday we used to have 40 prams — because it was child-friendly. We have to work out a way to attract people. We all need to go out a little and eat, but it needs to be good value...
“One thing is for sure,” Jay adds, “in troubled times entrepreneurs can make thing happen.”
Who’d bet against Jay Bourke? He might be on a boat getting his head together but he is not sailing off into the sunset just yet.