A once golden couple who lived Celtic Tiger dream

IN June 2003 in an interview with a Sunday newspaper, Siobhán Kearney spoke movingly of her love of her new life on the Spanish holiday island of Majorca where she and her husband, Brian, had bought a hotel just six months earlier.

The prosperous, hard-working couple had got the keys to a smart, three-storey townhouse in the town of Soller just before Christmas the previous year, which they subsequently converted into a six-bedroom boutique hotel.

To the casual observer, they were the high-achieving couple who were living the Celtic Tiger dream. Life seemed good for the Kearneys as they settled into living abroad, having finally got around to realising their long-held ambition to emigrate from Ireland. Although they both had independently started their own businesses back home which enjoyed considerable success, they still longed for a more relaxed type of lifestyle which their €2.2m purchase of the Hotel Salvia appeared to offer.