An Irish welcome in the desert

HAD YOU approached Gerald Lawless, when he was a teenager in Galway, and said the word ‘Dubai’ he probably would have thought you were enquiring about some sort of purchase he had made.

He could not have known then that he would spend a large part of his life in the Emirate he had never even heard of. Then again, the chief executive officer of the Jumeirah Hotel Group freely admits he did not really have a notion what he was going to do when he finished school back in 1971.

“My father was a dairy farmer,” says Lawless from his sunny garden in Dubai. “I knew I didn’t want to be a dairy farmer and a friend of the family got me into the Great Southern in Galway. At the same time I applied to Shannon. At that time you needed experience in a hotel before you got in.”