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.