‘Gentle soul’ O’Regan passes away

Hugh O’Regan, who has died unexpectedly at the age of 49, has been described by friends as a visionary and a gentle soul.

Friends say he had been suffering from a huge amount of stress since the collapse of his business empire in 2009. Mr O’Regan was described as a “lifelong entrepreneur”.

From Clontarf, Dublin, he lived in Sandymount with his wife Adrienne and four sons, aged from 14 to 27.

He went from school to work for AIB, but the lure of the pub trade brought him to the rundown area of Temple Bar in Dublin in the late 1980s. Funded by a small inheritance, he went into business with his brother Declan. They bought O’Flaherty’s pub, then the Temple Bar pub. The Hollywood film Far and Away, starring Tom Cruise, was partly shot in the Temple Bar, which helped popularise the area.

Mr O’Regan then bought the Thomas Read pub on Dame St and Parliament St, the pub that gave its name to the group which controlled his chain of pubs across most of Dublin’s fashionable areas.

His businesses thrived in the 1990s. The economy started to boom.

He opened the Morrison Hotel, one of the first boutique hotels in the capital, in 1999.

However, the pub trade became more challenging. The smoking ban in 2004 put a huge dent in profits, but Mr O’Regan continued to expand his businesses, fuelled in a large part by cheap funding from the banks.

He pumped a huge sum of money into the Kiltiernan Gold & Spa Hotel in Dublin, which was heavily loss-making.

The banks and property markets both crumbled in 2008. Mr O’Regan owed Anglo Irish Bank €80m and Irish Nationwide Building Society €180m. Eventually, Nama appointed receivers to his companies in 2009.

He was on the receiving end of several high-profile multimillion-euro judgments and was barred from acting as a company director for five years in July.

Mr O’Regan had been a generous donor to TCD.

He has been described by friends as “very spiritual and a very much a family man”.