O'Regan, Brendan

by Terry Clavin

O'Regan, Brendan (1917–2008), businessman, was born 15 May 1917 in Sixmilebridge, Co. Clare, the fourth child of seven of James O'Regan and his wife Nora (née Ryan). His father owned and managed a variety of local businesses, including the Old Ground Hotel in Ennis, Co. Clare, and was chairman of Clare County Council (1906–15). Brendan attended national school in Sixmilebridge before boarding at Blackrock College, Co. Dublin, where he played rugby and hurling. During 1936–8 he travelled through Europe studying hotel management in Switzerland at Lucerne and working in hotels in Wales, Bavaria and London. In 1938 his father leased the Falls Hotel in Ennistymon, Co. Clare, and recalled him to manage it.

His low-key efficiency revived an elegant establishment, leading members of the Stephen's Green Club to recruit O'Regan for their ailing Dublin haunt. He spent several months in 1943 improving the club's fare and finances, impressing two important members, the minister for industry and commerce, Seán Lemass (qv), and the secretary of Lemass's department, John Leydon (qv). In December 1943 they made him manager of the restaurants at the seaplane base in Foynes, Co. Limerick, and the nearby landplane base at Rineanna, Co. Clare, employing him as a private contractor with the right to one-quarter of the profits.

Determined to present his country in the best light to foreign travellers, O'Regan blended sophisticated continental cooking with homely Irish recipes to create a standard of catering superior to that prevailing in the rest of war-ravaged Europe. Obsessive about 'eye appeal', he stimulated his chefs into devising assorted innovative presentations, most notably Joe Sheridan's invention in 1944 of Irish coffee by pouring cream on sweetened, whiskey-laced coffee.

The Foynes operation was closed in 1946 with all staff transferring to Rineanna, thereafter known as Shannon, which became the transit stop for half of all traffic crossing the north Atlantic during 1945–55. O'Regan expanded his operations, opening a separate kitchen to provide in-flight meals, a passenger bar and a 200-bed hotel. In 1951 he established Ireland's first catering school, later the Shannon College of Hotel Management. His peak-season staff of 300 served 3,000 meals daily by 1950, and he drove them hard during the frenzied, forty-five-minute transits, though the liberal tips provided by American passengers sustained morale. Irregular arrivals, however, necessitated an unprofitable, twenty-four-hour catering service.

Salvation beckoned in the form of a small kiosk that he ran within the terminal, which became a nationally significant dollar earner in the late 1940s. From 1947 O'Regan pressed for duty-free facilities for the shop, and opened a general store for showcasing Irish craftwork in 1949. In return for reducing his share of profits to 5 per cent, he was permitted to sell duty-free wines, spirits and cigarettes, first to aircraft crews in July 1950, and then to passengers a year later. Helped by the generous allowances enjoyed by Americans, liquor receipts swelled from $29,000 in 1950 to $500,000 in 1955.

The decision in 1950 to allow the airport general store to sell foreign-produced goods yielded similarly spectacular sales increases, and duty-free status was gradually conferred upon its merchandise. The shop expanded relentlessly, developed a modern department store layout, and stocked French perfumes, cashmere, German and Japanese cameras, and Swiss watches, all at bargain prices. Shannon remained the world's only duty-free airport shop until the early 1960s and, unlike its imitators, was kept under single management (O'Regan's).

Thanks to the duty-free business, O'Regan's Sales and Catering operation reaped $1.75 million in 1955, 20 per cent of Ireland's dollar exports. That year the profit-sharing arrangement gave him an annual income of £6,000, making him one of the biggest earners in the country. Though careful with money, he was not greedy, and in 1955 agreed to reduce his commission, as it had become a political embarrassment. His income from Sales and Catering rose to £9,000 by the end of the decade and to over £20,000 by his retirement.

These riches were not begrudged by his employees who appreciated his progressive attitude towards labour relations, albeit after a fraught period in which he resisted unionisation, leading in 1951 to a no-warning strike by one-third of his employees. Thereafter he encouraged union membership and permitted employees a high degree of participation in decision-making, which abetted the development of the duty-free concept.

When improvements in aircraft technology led airlines to bypass Shannon in the late 1950s, he persuaded Lemass to put him in charge of an embryonic authority with responsibility for saving the airport (October 1957). O'Regan and leading Sales and Catering personnel frenziedly pursued initiatives relating to industry, tourism and airfreight. He introduced brainstorming sessions whereby participants were encouraged to improvise fancifully, further dispelling inhibitions by holding such meetings as outdoor picnics.

Seizing on a suggestion made by an American journalist, he sought to generate freight traffic through the airport by establishing beside it a tax-free, export industrial estate. After inspecting the free-trade zone in Panama and the export-processing zone in Puerto Rico in spring 1958, he secured legislation that offered foreign manufacturing companies various inducements, principally customs-free facilities through any Irish port for goods either destined for or coming from Shannon, tax exemption on income from exports for twenty-five years, readymade factories at subsidised rents, and infrastructural and support services.

O'Regan mounted a promotional drive aimed at America that urged the use of Ireland's preferential access to British and Commonwealth markets to 'hop a wall' of regulations. In January 1959, the Shannon Free Airport Development Company (SFADCo) was established with O'Regan as chairman. SFADCo intruded locally upon various government departments' and state agencies' patches, and O'Regan encouraged his team to assert themselves on the ground, smoothing ruffled feathers through his good personal relations with assorted public-sector paladins and his high favour with Lemass, who became taoiseach in 1959.

O'Regan gambled first on building factory units in advance of occupiers and then on accepting dubious ventures in the hope that the signs of activity would impress reputable investors. Colourful and fleeting early tenants drew criticism, but he hooked the prestige company he needed in 1960 when American industrial conglomerate Standard Pressed Steel moved in. By 1966 the estate had attracted over £6 million in foreign investment, employed 3,000 people, and accounted for 30 per cent of the state's manufactured exports in value terms, though imported materials then comprised 81 per cent of the Shannon zone's export value. In time, the initially menial labour was replaced by more sophisticated industrial processes involving better jobs in electronics and financial services firms. In 1962 O'Regan travelled to Taiwan to assist the establishment of an export industrial zone, and SFADCo personnel were regularly seconded to advise developing countries on such zones and on airport management.

The long commute required by many workers created a need for housing, and in 1960 SFADCo decided to build the first new town in Ireland since the eighteenth century, receiving the powers and financial assistance granted to local authorities following an acrimonious tussle between O'Regan and the minister for local government, Neil Blaney (qv). Building in this remote locale was controversial since many established municipalities were crying out for investment. The government's tardy and inadequate financing of the town's development contributed towards its unattractive appearance and ensured that the social facilities lagged behind population growth, which reached only 3,000 by 1970, well short of O'Regan's projected 25,000. By then the need for the town had been removed by the proliferation of car ownership.

The effects on Sales and Catering revenues of a near halving of transit traffic through Shannon during 1957–65 was mitigated by the success from 1959 of the mail-order division, which O'Regan had initiated in 1954 to export goods duty free from the airport premises. In 1965 the mail-order business contributed to nearly half of duty-free sales. Recognising the need to develop disembarking tourist traffic through Shannon Airport, he was helped by his appointment in 1957 as chairman of Bord Fáilte Éireann (the Irish tourist board), having joined its board in 1955 and manoeuvred his ally Tim O'Driscoll (qv) into the position of director general a year later. He inaugurated a policy of generous incentives for the building of modern hotels, persuading Irish-American businessmen to build five hotels in the Shannon region from 1959 to 1964.

SFADCo and Bord Fáilte contributed to the restoration of Bunratty Castle (1957–60), a project driven by O'Regan and his regular collaborator John Hunt (qv) (1900–1976), with whom he shared a passion for history and aesthetics. (Also in tandem with Hunt he opened an Irish folk village beside Bunratty Castle in 1964.) Convinced there was an American market for Irish heritage tourism, he held trial medieval-style banquets in the castle from summer 1962. Skilfully marketed by the SFADCo promotional office opened by O'Regan in New York in autumn 1962, the banquet proved immensely popular with US tourists. He established further feasts in the castles of Dún Guaire, Co. Galway, which was leased, and Knappogue, Co. Clare, after persuading a wealthy American to redevelop it. O'Regan's efforts stimulated a 1960s Irish tourist boom concentrated on Shannon. Whereas almost 90 per cent of Shannon Airport arrivals were transit passengers in the 1950s, some 257,000 of the 470,000 passengers landing in Shannon disembarked in 1966.

From 1957 he was less involved in Sales and Catering, and, as SFADCo developed a strong management team in the mid 1960s, he continued as chairman while yielding executive authority. Presiding in 1970 over 1,000 employees in Sales and Catering, and another 200 in SFADCo, he concentrated on broad policy and discrete pet projects while trying to devote more time to his family. In 1950 he married Rita Barrow from Preston, England, with whom he had two sons and three daughters. They initially lived in Ennis before moving to a lakeside mansion at Killaloe, Co. Clare.

Influenced by his religiously sceptical father, O'Regan was an agnostic until middle age when he embraced the unconventional spiritualism of Jesuit philosopher and visionary Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, becoming a sincere, ecumenically-minded catholic. Thereafter, he promoted social, cultural and religious issues, particularly championing the revival of the Irish language, despite never mastering it. However, his relentless advocacy of various worthy causes and unfashionable support for state enterprise created a sense that he was out of touch.

His influence had been waning since the mid 1960s when the Shannon complex lost both its chief patron upon Lemass's retirement and its original raison d'être as Ireland opened up its entire economy to foreign investment. The civil service and interested semi-state companies adopted a more critical view of O'Regan's empire and SFADCo's funding was curtailed. When SFADCo was given responsibility for the regional development of counties Limerick and Clare, and Co. Tipperary (North Riding) in 1968, the hostility of the Dublin-based civil service and of the Industrial Development Authority (IDA), effectively neutered its initiatives.

Distracted by jurisdictional disputes with the IDA and the airport authority Aer Rianta, his position deteriorated from 1969 as a US recession led to a sharp fall in tourist traffic and in employment at the industrial estate, with tourism being further hit by the Northern Ireland troubles. In December 1972 he was abruptly told that Sales and Catering was to be absorbed into Aer Rianta. He negotiated an annual, inflation-adjusted pension of £5,000, and stepped down as head of Sales and Catering the next year, also resigning as chairman of Bord Fáilte. Remaining SFADCo chairman, he concentrated during 1973–4 on expanding its role as a consulting agency for developing countries, and moved the Irish government to set up DEVCO (State Agencies Development Cooperation Organisation), which coordinated aid projects for developing countries, and was its founder chairman (1975–8).

From the mid 1970s, he argued that SFADCo should relinquish its industrial responsibilities and become a community development agency for the Gaeltacht region. He was supported by the minister for the Gaeltacht, Tom O'Donnell, but not the SFADCo management. After the newly elected Fianna Fáil government rejected O'Regan's proposals in 1977, he resigned as chairman in 1978, continuing on the board until 1985.

Having been previously active in promoting cross-border initiatives, in 1978 O'Regan set up Cooperation North, a non-political, southern-based organisation dedicated to promoting peace in Ireland through cooperation in business, tourism, education and culture. He also founded in 1985 the Irish Peace Institute, which researched the causes of the Northern troubles, and in 1986 the Centre for International Cooperation, which unsuccessfully tried to turn Shannon into a major centre for international trade fairs and conferences.

He moved in 1993 to Newmarket-on-Fergus, Co. Clare, where he founded a community organisation called Obair, and then in 1999 to Malahide, Co. Dublin. Made a freeman of Limerick in 1995, he was also awarded an honorary CBE (1993) for contributing towards peace in Northern Ireland, and honorary doctorates in law from the NUI (1978), QUB (1999), and the University of Limerick (2002). While visiting his daughter in England he died on 2 February 2008 and was buried in Drumcliffe cemetery, Ennis.

By developing Shannon duty-free shopping and then extending this concept to the industrial estate, O'Regan demonstrated that, instead of counter-productively husbanding its sovereignty, Ireland could thrive by bartering it instead. The conduit for the projection of soft American power into Ireland in the form of multinational industry and mass tourism, O'Regan's Shannon was both a showcase and laboratory for the state's adaptation to the freer worldwide movement of people and capital.