Jury’s to be knocked in €160m revamp
The jobs will be lost over a two-year period before the redeveloped Lancaster Quay location opens with a new six-storey hotel, 300 apartments and 450 underground parking spaces.
O'Callaghan Properties bought Jury's Hotel and its four-acre site on the city's Western Road for a fee believed to be over €3m.
Pat McGann, chief executive of the Jurys Doyle Group, was in Cork yesterday to announce the imminent closure of the hotel to staff.
The group will lease-back the new hotel from O'Callaghan Properties when completed in the summer of 2006, subject to a successful planning application.
The development will see the construction of a 185-bed, four-star hotel, 300 luxury apartments and associated parking.
Jurys Doyle Group will have a major input into the overall design of the hotel.
The hotel will be held on a 35-year lease from O'Callaghan Properties and while this arrangement has yet to be firmed up, Mr Mc Cann did give an indication of the basic terms involved.
"The cost of the lease would depend on the value of the property on a hotel worth €30m the leasehold terms would be in the order of 6% or 7% of that sum," he said.
This would amount to an annual cost of €2.1m but in lease-back sales such as this, there are significant tax breaks involving the option to purchase the property at the end of a 10-year period usually on favourable terms.
The new plans, which will see the existing hotel razed also provide for a new bridge connecting the island-site to Lancaster Quay at the right of Mardyke Street, with the original bridge retained.
SIPTU branch secretary Tom O'Driscoll said the 250 staff felt "absolutely gutted and angered that they will be the only losers in the proposed new development".
