The Eyre Powell hotel in Newbridge, County Kildare, made the news at the weekend following the apparent discovery of a firearm on the premises which houses applicants for International Protection.
The weapon was subsequently found to be a pellet gun that was hidden in the vent of a room occupied by four males from North Africa.
The hotel has been used as an accommodation centre for the past 20 years and has proven to be among the top earners for the owners of the hotel – a company called Peachport. The original contract was with a company called Cherryport, the contract changed from Cherryport to Peachport in 2013, but the principals involved in the two companies are the same people.
Cherryport is owned jointly by Joseph Germaine and Philomena Germaine who are also the owners of Ourville Limited which has 100% ownership of Peachport as well as two other wholly owned subsidiaries; Heatherway Taverns and Slaneygio. Slaneygio bought the Scagg’s Alley pub in Carlow last September.
Joseph Germaine is also a director of three holding companies; Criptvale, Stovedale and Darwen View all of which have the same address as Cherryport, Peachport, and Ourville, at Main Street, Baltinglass, County Wicklow.
Philomena Germaine is also a director of the same companies as well as joint owner of two of them.
Joseph Germaine had claimed in 2020 to be setting about creating a holiday resort in Baltinglass that would have an investment of €8 million but decided not to proceed with it claiming that he had gotten no support from Wicklow County Council. In 2009 ACC Bank sought proceedings against Germaine and John Wall over an unpaid €7.6 million in loans taken to develop two hotels in Wexford.
The Eyre Powell and other hotels owned by the family and used for asylum accommodation have certainly proven to be massive earners. Between 2004 and 2018 the contracts pulled in around €15 million. Since then, and up to the end of the first quarter of 2024, Peachport has trousered another €22 million. So a total of more than €37 million puts the Germaines into the elite of the asylum accommodation entrepreneurial class.
Peachport also bought The Gables guesthouse in Newbridge in June 2023 and proceeded to change its original purpose – it was then housing persons in the local authority who required emergency accommodation – to providing accommodation to persons who have applied for asylum.
The sale price for The Gable when purchased by Peachport was, according to newspaper reports, €1.35 million. It certainly sounds like an attractive place, with an indoor swimming pool and so on, but unfortunately when I attempted to ring the number on their site to make a booking in case a hot tip might come in for the Derby on Sunday at the Curragh I was informed that it is “no longer in service.” Looks like the tent in Donnelly’s Hollow for me so. Might give one of the NGOs a buzz.
I jest, of course. The Gables, despite protests from local people, has been in use for asylum accommodation since October 2023.
The former guesthouse has 25 rooms: so if we posit a €120 per night charge for accommodation in ordinary circumstances, which would appear to be around the average for the area. Fáílte Ireland says that guesthouses typically experienced a 80% occupancy rate – which would suggest an expected gross income of €876,000 for The Gables for the provision of accommodation in an ordinary year.
Now, what might such a fine establishment expect to take in from a contract for asylum applicants?
Well, Peachport pulled in €1,085,280 for providing accommodation for International Protection applicants alone in the first three months of 2024. Plus a further €571,140 for the lads fleeing the Rooskies in the Ukraine. So that gives us some idea.
We previously made a guesstimate – which no one has contradicted – that on the basis of the first five monthly payments of €629,480 to the Drakeford company which had turned the Blarney Stone guesthouse over to IP applicants that they had taken in well over twice what they might have expected to turnover in the same period if the guesthouse had been maintained as its original purpose.
The Germaines would appear to be an example of a family business which began in the licensed trade and then decided that providing accommodation for asylum seekers was a far better option.
When Peachport was established in 2013 and took over the accommodation contracts from Cherryport its constitution made reference, along with its apparently primary object of running bars and restaurants. to “provision of emergency accommodation.” There is no such reference in the Constitution of Cherryport which was established in 1999.
Indeed, I suspect that any company back then purporting to have as its object such a thing would have been looked at askance. Now, it has become a multi-billion sector which has, along with attracting a host of eagle-eyed investors from overseas, in effect created a whole new class of people who are in receipt of these state cheques. Upper market Royle families. And alongside them a whole host of offshoots who wet their beak in the asylum trough after a more modest fashion in everything from providing JCBs and bouncers to engaging in a sometimes mesmerizing conjuring up of new companies which appear and disappear with the regularity and speed of the Mayfly.