If you build it, don’t bet on them coming

THE ruin hugs the rugged shore straddling the bays of Ballinskelligs and Waterville. Once upon a long ago it was a hotel. Today it sits in an overgrown field, a three-storey concrete skeleton, like something lifted from a bomb-ravaged city. You can walk up and look inside the walls at the rubble, the moth eaten furniture, the sepia-toned dreams pummelled by time.

The Reenroe Hotel on the Iveragh peninsula of Co Kerry was once going to be the future. Built in the early 1970s, it included an airstrip to accommodate the high rollers and foreigners who would fly in to get a slice of a hidden paradise. The hotel was surrounded by ornate landscaping, ahead of its time. A stone’s throw away, the Atlantic waves washed up on the beach, and opened up into a vista of natural beauty. The developer was a local hotelier who dreamed big but reached too far. If he had access to proper market research at the time, maybe he would have realised that some dreams should never be taken from the imagination and made flesh.

The developers of the casino complex in Two Mile Borris would do well to travel to south Kerry and see the ruins that are left behind.

Last week’s decision by An Bord Pleanála to allow the development of a €460 million complex in the Co Tipperary village has been well received locally. The reaction is understandable. The complex promises up to 3,000 jobs at a time when unemployment is 15%.

The bright, shining light at the centre of the 800-acre development, on which the whole thing stands or falls, is a huge casino, the biggest of its kind in Europe. There are plans for a dog track, and an all-weather racing track.

A 500-room hotel will accommodate the gamblers and racegoers. A helipad will be built to ferry in the high flyers. As a carrot to American tourists, there will be a mock-up of the White House, which was designed by Irishman James Hoban, who was from Kilkenny, not Tipperary.

The American tourists who come in search of their roots, the laid-back lifestyle, and the green and fair land, will be met with Las Vegas on the M8, and a theme tuned cut-out of the White House.

Over in Las Vegas, somebody hit on the great idea of creating Caesar’s Palace from a different time and place. In Tipperary, they intend to bring a slice of DC to Two Mile Borris. The holidaying Yanks will be made to feel at home, just when they want to get away.

High rollers will add glamour. The professional gamblers and playboys who traverse the globe from Macau to Atlantic City and Vegas in white dinner jackets and private jets will now drop in on Two Mile to roll the dice. Once you build it, they will come. Lucky Charlie Luciano did just that in the Nevada desert, and now Michael Lowry and Richard Quirke are intent on doing it in rural Co Tipperary.

The whole thing is the brainchild of Quirke, a former garda, who is the proprietor of the wonderfully named Dr Quirkey’s Goodtime Emporium, on Dublin’s O’Connell St.

Now, he intends to move up in the gambling stakes with the casino venture in his native county. At his shoulder, taking care of the political machinations required to push such a project, is the local TD, Michael Lowry. The Moriarty Tribunal has found Lowry to have been a thoroughly corrupt politician. It also found that he was a liar. By his own admission, he cheated in a major way on his taxes. With a record like that, he should go a long way in the gambling business.

To be fair to the developer though, people are entitled to dream. One industry source estimates that a throughput of up to 20,000 customers would be required each week to make the venture viable.

If Quirke believes that can be achieved, good luck to him. In the short term, if the project goes ahead, it will create more than 1,000 construction jobs, no mean feat in the current climate. After that, the worst that can happen is that it turns out to be entirely unviable, the developer loses all his money, and the buildings are left on the side of the motorway as a gaping sore, another testimony to woeful planning.

But unlike the developer, the relevant state agencies have responsibilities to wider society. How An Bord Pleanála granted permission is beyond any comprehension.

Like the developer, the board appears to be focusing primarily on the short-term benefits, an approach that was honed to an art form in planning through the bubble years.

The venture defies all proper planning in relation to a thought out spacial strategy, which would have earmarked any such venture to be located near on of the state’s major towns or cities.

What cost would accrue for the jobs that might be created in the development?

At a time when the greyhound business is struggling, a new track in Two Mile Borris would have severe implications for the existing track in Thurles, five miles from Two Mile.

There is no way that the area could support two such tracks. In recent years, the Thurles track has received major investment, including a grant of €1m in 2010. Is all that to be sacrificed on the alter of a dream based on high and low rollers pouring into a casino up the road?

Does the country need another major hotel? Right now, NAMA is cleaning up the mess left by the wholesale tax breaks that were offered to build hotels the country over. As a business, it is completely oversubscribed. Nobody in their right mind would build a stand alone hotel at the moment, but like everything else, it’s all tied into the gambling element of the project. And herein, the Government must step.

So far, the local government and planning authorities have seen fit to give the project the nod. But none of it will come to pass unless the casino gets the nod. Currently, casinos are illegal, but fresh legislation on gambling is due as the current law dates from 1956.

Is the Government now under pressure to bring in laws that will suit Two Mile Vegas? For instance, the viability is largely dependent on the number of slot machines in the casino. Is the legislation governing slot machines to be led by Quirke and Lowry?

The answers will be forthcoming over the next year. Don’t bet against it. So far, the impression is growing that the current Government has learned little from the glaring mistakes of its predecessor.

And if the Government does oblige, it’s all systems go to make Two Mile Borris a Las Vegas on the M8.

If you build it, they will come. Go visit Reenroe in Waterville Bay to see the result of what happened to that field of dreams. They didn’t come.