Tunney, Hugh Thomas

by Terry Clavin

Tunney, Hugh Thomas (1927–2011), businessman, was born on 15 December 1927 in Trillick, Co. Tyrone, the eldest of ten children of James Tunney, a cattle dealer of Trillick, and his wife Mary Anne (née Gallagher). Born into a line of butchers and cattle dealers, he had a troubled childhood, as his father was an alcoholic. (Hugh became a chain-smoker who drank alcohol sparingly and tea copiously.) In 1933 the Tunneys moved to Bundoran, Co. Donegal, where he worked in his father's butcher shop, killing his first lamb at the age of eight. His family returned to Trillick in 1941, the year he finished his schooling at De La Salle College, Ballyshannon in Co. Donegal to become an apprentice in McGirr's Butchers in Irvinestown, Co. Fermanagh. He also worked on a farm he inherited from his grandmother. In 1946 he bought a butcher's shop in Irvinestown.

By 1951 he had emigrated to London to work in butcher's shops and meat factory boning halls. He met a Belfast woman Eileen Armstrong, marrying her in London in 1955; they had two sons and two daughters. Returning to Ireland after 1956, he dealt cattle for the Molihan Brothers of Ardagh, Co. Longford, and the Scott Brothers of Belfast. Then setting up on his own, he based himself in Belfast while travelling extensively buying cattle for export mainly to Scotland. His thriving business helped pioneer Irish cattle exports to southern Europe, north Africa and the Middle East.

As the cattle export trade went into decline in 1967, he established a meat plant at Clones, Co. Monaghan, with the help of northern investors. He bought the nearby Crossmoyle House as his residence. A struggling border town, Clones provided him with a cheap and docile labour force composed mainly of part-time farmers. Winning over suppliers by paying promptly, he developed beef markets in Britain, continental Europe and the USA, and supplied cattle to Libya. He bought out the last of the original investors in September 1971 by which time his meat plant was the fastest growing in Ireland, having 170 workers and an estimated annual turnover of £6 million.

He drove a revival in the economic fortunes of Clones, buying farms and business premises in the area, eventually amassing a construction company, a pub, two cinemas and three car dealerships. After acquiring Clonavilla House, a 300-year-old relic of the protestant ascendancy occupied by ten generations of the FitzGerald family, he relished burning it down to make way for a feeding lot capable of carrying 2,000 cattle on winter silage. A notably ruthless operator in a region where smuggling was rife and commerce blended into small-scale banditry, he paid compensation in 1975 to an estranged associate for property damage.

When an extraordinary cattle glut overwhelmed Ireland's underdeveloped processing network in autumn 1974, small store cattle farmers were obliged to take whatever price they could get before their livestock starved. Consequently, the processors reaped an enormous windfall during 1974–5 from the guaranteed beef prices paid by the EEC's intervention system. Tunney was widely believed to have relied almost entirely on intervention during this period irrespective of official documents showing that sixty per cent of his beef was sold commercially. Such scepticism was justified, as the sheer volume of sales enabled rampant fraud.

Tunney gained more than other processors because the UK's non-participation in the intervention system prompted farmers in Northern Ireland to avail of the better prices just over the border at Clones. His regular suppliers were undercut while northern factories idled. This enabled him to snap up stricken meat plants in Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, (1974) and Whiteabbey, Belfast (1975). Having previously kept the unions out of his Clones plant, he sacked workers in his Enniskillen factory for joining a union, but relented after a strike in autumn 1974. By 1976 all his plants were unionised. Aided by government grants totalling £4.5 million, he invested heavily in modernising his three plants and amassed more beef processing capacity than any other operator in Ireland.

In 1975 he also paid £3 million for three hotels in Co. Monaghan, two in Bundoran, two in Dublin city (including the prestigious Gresham hotel) and one in Co. Wexford; all were then renovated lavishly. Leaving him with 1,650 employees, this mid 1970s spree crystallised his status as Ireland's first prominent 'beef baron' and encouraged rumours of his involvement in smuggling and money laundering. His marriage having seemingly broken down in 1975, he began a relationship with his marketing executive Caroline Devine, living with her in the Gresham. He never divorced his wife.

An enigmatic figure, he was a devotee of St Thérèse of Lisieux and St Anthony, and undertook annual pilgrimages to Lough Derg. In the late 1970s he befriended Patrick Peyton (qv), the renowned 'Rosary Priest', putting him up in the Gresham whenever he visited Ireland. (After involvement in a car crash that killed a woman in 1977, he claimed he had been driving slowly while saying the rosary, and was fined £100 for dangerous driving.) Regarding thirteen as his lucky number, he insisted on concluding important deals on the thirteenth day of the month. He could be engaging and generous, but grew increasingly domineering, unpredictable and odd.

The events of 1974–5 denuded Ireland of cattle and destroyed Tunney's relations with his established suppliers. Starved of cattle from 1976, he either closed his factories temporarily or operated them on a reduced schedule. His Belfast plant was considered among the most impressive in Britain and Ireland, but was underused as the EEC inadvertently subsidised cattle exports from Northern Ireland to the Republic. Much to the fury of local trade unionists, he sent cattle purchased in the Belfast region to Clones for slaughter. Whiteabbey was an overwhelmingly protestant area and Tunney generally hired locals of that persuasion, especially after a catholic worker, who had been transferred temporarily from the Clones plant, was killed by loyalists in 1977.

The hotel trade suffered, as the violence in Northern Ireland spread south: in August 1976 loyalists bombed the Gresham after which a series of hoax bomb threats disrupted its operations. Six months before he renovated his Clones factory, a bomb intended to destroy the facility, partially detonated in July 1977, causing minor damage. That December two men, one a former republican paramilitary, pleaded guilty to planting the device, saying they had been paid to do so by one of Tunney's business rivals. In the early 1990s the government tribunal established to investigate the beef industry received a submission from someone claiming to be one of those men, asserting that Tunney had hired them to bomb the factory so he could make an insurance claim.

From the mid 1970s the EEC's incoherent system of subsidies and levies for agricultural goods moving between member states limited Irish operators to the most basic forms of meat processing, rendering Tunney's ultra-modern facilities at Clones largely redundant. As Tunney came under financial pressure, his right-hand man Eamon Mackle departed in 1977, returning temporarily in 1978 to staunch ruinous losses at Whiteabbey. Following a subsequent dispute over money, Mackle alleged in 1981 that Tunney paid staff tax-free and had moved machinery between his southern and northern plants so that he could claim grants in both jurisdictions. In 1991 Mackle further alleged that the Clones operation had under-weighed cattle bought from farmers, knowingly accepted TB infected cattle and smuggled cattle, all with the connivance of state inspectors and of a member of the Garda Síochána who would warn them when the RUC were checking containers at the border.

Having bought when prices were low, Tunney cleared his debts by selling most of his assets as the economy recovered during 1977–9. He retained Sachs Hotel in Dublin and the Clones meat plant while the Gresham sales deal in 1978 gave him free use for life of a 2,400 square foot luxury penthouse suite. There was also Classiebawn Castle in Sligo, a ten-bedroomed castle built in 1856 by the British prime minister Lord Palmerston, which Tunney leased in 1976 for twenty-one years from Lord Mountbatten, a leading member of the British royal family. In return for a small rent, Tunney agreed to finance badly needed renovations and to allow Mountbatten to have the castle every August. The two men were unalike yet bonded over their mutual passion for Classiebawn and interest in history.

On 27 August 1979 they met at Classiebawn to discuss the castle's upkeep after which Mountbatten invited Tunney to accompany him sea fishing. Tunney declined and was saying the rosary in his room when the IRA bomb placed on Mountbatten's boat exploded, killing Mountbatten, his wife, his grandson and a local boy. Tunney remained in touch with Mountbatten's family and preserved Mountbatten's possessions in Classiebawn. He bought the castle and 1,500-acre estate in 1991. A bomb was found at Classiebawn just before Mountbatten's devoted nephew Charles, Prince of Wales, toured Ireland in 1995; Prince Charles eventually visited Classiebawn in 2015.

A minor player in the Irish beef industry during the 1980s, Tunney ran his Clones factory conservatively, closing it for over half of most years and gearing its low cost production towards intervention sales. He sold the plant in 1991. By then, he was embroiled in a bitter dispute with his Sachs Hotel tenant, Philip Smyth, who in 1991 forwarded documents to the authorities indicating that Tunney had presided over widespread fraud at the Clones meat plant; it emerged that Smyth had paid a worker £5,000 for this material. In summer 1993 several of Tunney's former employees testified before the beef tribunal to myriad irregularities, being contradicted in turn by Tunney and others. The tribunal report (1994) deplored the manner in which Smyth had paid for information, but accepted that carcass weights had been inflated for the purposes of claiming storage aids and that meat sold into intervention had been misappropriated.

Tunney's costly and unsuccessful lawsuits aimed at ejecting Smyth from Sachs Hotel continued for twenty years from 1987, generating assorted claims and counter-claims. In 1989 a high court judge cleared Tunney of forging a contract while noting that he had lied and acted unreasonably. In 1996 the high court found that Tunney's partner Caroline Devine had made telephone calls to the British police falsely accusing Smyth of laundering money for the IRA. Smyth received £150,000 in damages.

Residing full-time in Classiebawn from 1991, Tunney made improvements to the estate that destroyed his already-fraught relations with the locals. (Unlike Mountbatten, he was unwilling to tolerate their pilferage, cattle grazing on his land and traditional rights of way.) In 2001 the circuit court granted an injunction restraining him from felling trees after he cut down 378 trees in contravention of a preservation order. Further controversy arose over his development work on sand dunes and his refusal of permission for a monument commemorating the many unbaptised infants buried in a mass grave on his property.

The Classiebawn employees he had inherited from Mountbatten left one by one after quarrelling with him. He pursued several of them through the courts seeking their eviction from residences on the estate. Despite attending Mass daily, he was otherwise isolated from the local community and reluctant to let anyone into the castle, which for lack of household staff became cluttered, shabby and uncomfortably damp and cold. He died on 20 June 2011 in the Blackrock Clinic, Dublin, and was buried in Magheralough Cemetery, Trillick. His will disposed of €8.2 million, mainly into a trust for his children; Devine received a yearly income of €40,000 and the use of Classiebawn for life.