Tom Moran Leaves €21M

Tom Moran, one of Ireland’s best known hoteliers, left over €21m in his will. He appointed his children, John and ­Karen, to oversee trust funds set out in the document.

Mr Moran died in March last year at the age of 72. During his career, which spanned more than 50 years, he built and lost an empire, but he never lost his positivity.

Tom grew up on a family farm in Toureen Donnell near Athea in west Limerick. His father, Thomas, died when Tom was six years old, leaving his mother, Cathy, to run the 50-acre farm and care for seven children, the youngest of whom was just 17 days old.

Opportunities for school leavers were scarce, and as soon as his three older brothers were old enough, they left for London. He spent two years at Newcastle West Vocational School before opting to become an apprentice coffin-maker in Listowel. But he didn’t linger in this job, following his brothers to London when he was 16.

He worked on a building site and in a tyre factory and drove a taxi before settling into bar work in west London. There he met another young emigrant, Sheila Cleary from Enniskillen, who would later become his wife.

He secured his first pub from a brewery aged 19 after pretending he was 23, and believed he was the youngest ever pub licensee in the UK.

Tom and Sheila married in Greenwich in 1971 and went on to run several pubs together, including The Man of Kent in Eltham and the Tulse Hill Tavern. They bought flats with their savings, renovated them, and rented them out, building up a nest egg to allow them to return to Ireland with their four children.

By the time they arrived in Limerick in 1980, they had bought the Top of the Town pub in his native Athea and the Country Club in nearby Carrigkerry. As well as running the pubs and a shop, post office and undertaker business, he organised point-to-point meetings and carnivals in a field behind the Country Club.

At this stage, the couple had seven children. They were planning to move into Limerick city in the late 1980s when he bought Bourke’s bar. But the plan changed after a friend asked him to accompany him to the auction of the Red Cow Inn on Dublin’s Naas Road in 1988. They arrived at the pub at lunchtime, and he noted the packed car park and busy bar serving food.

He later said he had no intention of buying the pub, but when the auction started and the price neared £1 million, he found himself raising his hand. The gavel fell at £1,010,000, (almost €1.3 million), making him the first person to pay more than £1 million for a pub in Ireland.

The family moved to Dublin, and he went on to acquire a stable of pubs, including the Playwright and the Mad Hatter in Blackrock, the Central Bar in Clondalkin and the Pier House in Skerries.

After more than two decades in the pub trade, he changed direction in 1996 when he opened his first hotel on the grounds of the Red Cow Inn. He bought the six Bewley’s Hotels in Dublin and the UK for €570 million in 2007, just before the property bubble burst.

He decided to focus on hotels and sold all the pubs, apart from the Red Cow Inn. He bought the Crown pub in Cricklewood in 1998 to develop it into a hotel and later bought the Silver Springs Hotel in Cork and opened the Chiswick Moran Hotel in London.

Financial restructuring followed and, in 2015, he sold all the hotels to Dalata, with the exception of the Red Cow Moran Hotel, the property closest to his heart.

He received a big setback in 2016 when he had a stroke and fell, in Spain.

Against the odds, three years after Tom’s stroke, he was well enough to abseil from the roof of the Red Cow Moran Hotel’s new nine-storey extension. Several celebrities joined him to raise funds for St James’s Hospital.