Any Other Business

Inside the Denis O’Brien yacht: a snip at $0.5m a week

Denis O’Brien’s yacht Nero grabbed most of the headlines last week at the Palm Beach International Boat Show in Florida. “Reaching just under 300 feet in length, the Nero is without doubt one of the most eye-catching vessels at the entire show,” the New York Post reported. “Inside it could not be more luxurious.”

Nero, which famously keeled over while being repaired in Genoa in 2019, is available to charter. Although only “for the most discerning clients”, according to its broker.

And only for the wealthiest too. The prices start from $490,000 per week in the winter, when

Nero is in the Caribbean, to €497,000 in the summer, when it’s in the Med. For that you get five-star accommodation for 12 guests in six cabins, waited on hand and foot by a crew of 20.

The yacht’s features include two pizza ovens, a massage room, an on-board beautician, a gym on the sundeck, and a cinema.

“For those who want to go overboard”, says the blurb, “she has more than a dozen toys, including a waterslide, jet ski and flyboard.”

There is no word on whether Nero attracted anything more than tyre-kickers at Palm Beach. According to a report in Boat International (“the global authority in superyachting”), this year’s show had “lower foot traffic” than usual, but “higher-quality, more qualified clients.”

Food for thought at Conrad Hotel

I see the Conrad Hotel on Earlsfort Terrace in Dublin has had the builders in. They’ve been renovating its Terrace Restaurant, which is due to re-open on April 8.

It got us to thinking: whatever happened to Anna Haugh’s restaurant in the hotel, which opened amid much fanfare in October 2022? The TV chef from Tallaght, a judge on the BBC’s MasterChef: The Professionals, already operates the Myrtle Restaurant in Chelsea.

It’s fair to say ‘Anna Haugh at Conrad Dublin’ got some iffy notices in its early days.

Reviewing it for the Irish Independent, Katy McGuinness reported that the service was “all over the place” and concluded that “there are so many better options in the city” and this dining experience “is not at the races”.

Lucinda O’Sullivan said she was “kind of shocked by its failings”.

Despite trying to keep the bill “as reasonable as possible, [it] still came to a whopping €199.”

The Conrad described the restaurant as a pop-up “for at least six months” – which, as Katy McGuinness observed, sounded like a euphemism for “suck it and see”.

Well, the pop-up has since gone pop. The Conrad says the partnership with Haugh “came to a very amicable and natural conclusion”.

In a statement, Anna told me: “It was a wonderful pop-up and great to collaborate with The Conrad. At the moment there’s no plans in Ireland to open [another] business. But maybe in the future, when my son is a little older.”

There’s a catch in this game plan

“Every match yours to catch,” says the logo on an ad for a new housing estate, with a picture of the Aviva Stadium as the backdrop (you can see it above).

“Dublin’s getting a brand new town,” the blurb burbles on. Located on the Grand Canal, Seven Mills will soon be home to 15,000 people – and the Cairn Homes development will offer “a range of stylish homes surrounded by green parklands, schools, playgrounds, shops and cafes.”

Sounds lovely, but how come it’s going to be “12 minutes by train from the city centre”? Lansdowne Road is only about five minutes from town.

Well... that’s because Seven Mills is actually in Dublin 22, “on the banks of the Grand Canal between Clondalkin and Lucan”, as the advert eventually explains.

So if the residents of Seven Mills are going to “catch” a match at the Aviva, they’ll either have to take a long train journey themselves or else use the Hubble Space Telescope.

Moran’s museum of video games

A proposal to build a Museum of Gaming in Limerick will be in the election manifesto of John Moran, the former secretary general at the Department of Finance, who is bidding to be the city’s first directly elected mayor.

Moran says he had his eureka moment when he saw a queue in front of a Space Invaders screen during a visit to Moma in New York. Why not have a museum dedicated to the history of games in a city that was once home to Atari and Wang, he reasoned? It would be a “new centre of fun and learning” he feels, and might also encourage gaming programmers and designers to settle in Limerick.

Supporters of the GameCube concept even have a venue lined up – the Franciscans have offered the use of their church on Henry Street.

The three-storey building would be retrofitted, with the centrepiece being a life-sized Snakes and Ladders constructed against one of the walls, allowing visitors to climb or slide from floor to floor.

An application for funding to Fáilte Ireland’s capital investment programme for the €20m project was not successful.

Undaunted, Moran is making it the centrepiece of his election campaign. “I do not believe the road had to stop just because Fáilte Ireland said no. Limerick does not give up that easily,” he posted on LinkedIn.

“The tough decisions implemented during the Troika period, and good stewardship since, mean the Government now has some €30bn more to spend every year than what was available in my time as secretary general of the Department of Finance.

“As mayor, I’ll be making the case for more of that hardship dividend to be spent in Limerick to fund transformative ideas like the Game Cube along our waterfront.”

Loyal NI readers keep print afloat

Which newspaper has the lowest paid-for print circulation in the world? The Guinness Book of Records doesn’t have an entry – but we reckon the Coleraine and Ballymoney Times must be in with a shout.

According to newly audited figures for UK titles, it had a weekly circulation of just 84 last year, a 38pc drop on the previous year.

Next lowest was the Londonderry Sentinel, with 110 print sales a week. It’s hard to believe a newspaper could survive at that level, even with ads, but we do hope the Sentinel stays in print.

It was first published in 1829, when it cost 5d, and as recently as 2007 had a circulation of about 5,000.

Other Northern Ireland newspapers at the bottom of a league table compiled by the Press Gazette were the Ulster Star (222 weekly sales) and the Lurgan Mail (322).

All of these titles are owned by National World Publishing Ltd, a relatively new company that owns over 100 print and online titles. These include The Newsletter, the oldest English-language newspaper in the world, The Scotsman and the Yorkshire Post.

Almost all its Northern Ireland titles are printed by Associated Newspapers in Portadown.

The executive chairman of National World is the Northern Irish media executive David Montgomery (75), who knows a thing or two about newspapers, having once been chief sub-editor at the Mirror and later editor of the News of the World.

So we presume there’s sound commercial logic, and not just sentiment, behind keeping titles like the Coleraine and Ballymoney Times in print.

Poor mouth does Eir no favours

I see Oliver Loomes, the Eir CEO, has had another pop at the regulator. In a letter last September to Communications Minister Eamon Ryan, he accused Comreg of a “bias towards the unfair regulation of Eir and the imposition of disproportionate cost burdens” on the company.

The letter came just after a newspaper interview last July in which Loomes claimed Eir was being hampered from competing and called on the Government to launch an independent review of the regulator.

Poor Eir. Can you imagine how much better off the company owned by French billionaire Xavier Niel and two New York hedge funds would be if only Comreg was a bit nicer to them?

Admittedly Eir’s revenues last year were €1.296bn, up 4pc.

And yes, we can see there’s €182m cash on their balance sheet.

And indeed, yes, it does have the highest revenue share in the fixed market at 39.2pc, and almost 46pc of all fixed voice subscriber lines, more than twice that of its nearest competitor.

Think, though, how much more Eir could have returned to its investors, if only Comreg wasn’t so “biased”? I mean, it was only able to pay €237m in dividends in the first nine months of last year, and a miserly €800m in 2022.

It’s all so... so unfair.

And finally...

This week’s Man Whose Name Suits His Job is the chief people officer at DAA, the airports operator: one Brian Drain. Which no doubt autocorrects to Brain Drain every time you try to email him.

I DO NOT BELIEVE THE ROAD HAD TO STOP JUST BECAUSE FÁILTE IRELAND SAID NO