Ireland in the 1980s was a country overshadowed by big men with huge flaws. Charles Haughey, Eamonn Casey – and Ben Dunne, the supermarket mogul with an ebullient manner and feet of purest clay who died last November.
His is a story with everything. An IRA-kidnapping, Succession-style dynastic rivalry, a friendship with a corrupt taoiseach and a drugs bust in which U2 had a walk-on part. If they made a film about it, people would say it was far too outrageous to take with a straight face.
There’s a lot of ground to cover and Extraordinary Life: The Ben Dunne Story (RTÉ One, Monday) is up to the task – with the caveat that it is a surface-level portrait that largely focuses on the positives of Dunne and his legacy and, in the main, waves away any potential negatives, such as the impact of Dunnes Stores on other Irish retailers.
It captures the grand, absurd sweep of Dunne’s life – his upbringing as the son of Ben Dunne snr (the innovator who brought supermarkets and, in a way, consumerism to Ireland). There is also his October 1981 kidnapping at the hands of the Provisionals. The Dunnes seem to have been open to paying for his release but were frustrated by a government policy of not entertaining Provo ransom demands. The suggestion is that, in the end, the cash reached the terrorists anyway.
But this gripping documentary starts at the more obvious point: Dunne’s 1992 breakdown in a Florida hotel, where a cocaine binge with an escort in a luxury hotel appears to have tipped over into a psychotic episode.
Dunne’s torment was real, and he seemed to have been suffering PTSD from the kidnapping a decade earlier. Still, with U2 staying at the same hotel, it’s hard not to see the absurdity of the situation – as his acquaintance, journalist Sam Smyth, acknowledges. “When I went into the hotel, U2 were sitting down at a grand piano in the residents’ lounge,” recalls Smyth. “It was quite remarkable.”
Bono had caught wind that “some guy named Dunne” had been arrested for drug trafficking – and assumed it was a member of the Dunne crime family that had unleashed heroin upon Dublin in the late 1970s. It would never have occurred to him – or anyone else – that it was jocular Ben Dunne who had built his father’s (already impressive) business into a colossus with annual revenues of more than a billion pounds.
Dunne comes across as a very Irish mogul. He was ruddy and loqacious: anthropologists would describe him as possessing a “big Irish head”. Dunne is described by one acquaintance as “reckless with a feed of drink or cocaine in him”.
He was born into privilege – though the respect he craved from his father was not easily won. ‘My dad thought I was a spacer,” he says in an archive interview. “Didn’t he turn out to be right? I was a bit of a delinquent”.
If he lacked academic prowess, he was ruthless as a businessman. He nearly precipitated an economic crisis when his “bread war” strategy in the 1980s undercut his rivals – and threatened ruination on bakers. He also cracked down on workers who refused to handle goods from South Africa (he would later apologise).
Dunne’s story lacks a clean trajectory. After the drug bust, he was forced out of the family company and went on to launch a chain of gyms. There are no grand themes to be read into his life, no lessons for the rest of us to absorb – other than never to go on a cocaine binge in a Florida hotel.
But if the documentary doesn’t offer much in the way of psychoanalysis, it serves as a compelling insight into the Ireland of 40 years ago. What a foreign country it was: a place where the Dunnes St Bernard brand was ubiquitous, where on/off/on taoiseach Haughey (to whom Dunne served as secret benefactor) loomed over politics and every second television and radio show seemed to be presented by Gay Byrne.
It is a chapter of history rapidly receding from our collective lived experience. This effusive and non-judgemental portrait of Dunne reminds us what it was like and how much better we all are for having left that Ireland behind forever.
