Last September, we reported on the tale of two hotels in Gaoth Dobhair, the heart of the Donegal Gaeltacht, which had been taken over by a company which has several contracts to house refugees rather than tourists.
Óstan Gaoth Dobhair and Óstan Radharc na Mara – the Seaview – had been bought by Vesada Private Limited from the Boyle family who had run the hotels for many years, since 1969 in the case of Hotel Gweedore.
The Vesada project to reopen the hotels as tourist destinations was announced with great fanfare at an event hosted by Donegal Sinn Féin TD Pearse Doherty, who lives in Bun Beag, in September 2020. Doherty said that he was “delighted and honoured to be asked by the company to announce today the fact that the Seaview hotel and Óstan Ghaoth Dobhair have been sold and now that comes with a package of a €15m investment into the regeneration of the two sites by a company called the Revitalisation of Bunbeg Ltd”.
80 new jobs were promised, which seemed like good news at the time.
It is now an open question how much of that has, and will, transpire – because Vesada decided instead to take a contract from the state to provide accommodation for Ukrainians who have been granted Temporary Protection.
The Seaview is full to capacity with refugees, and while Hotel Gweedore remains “under renovation,” the holiday apartments next to it also appear to be full.
In an interview with Raidió na Gaeltachta on September 7, 2022, Ciarán Ó Muireagáin, who has been the public face of the project for Vesada in Bun Beag, spoke about the company’s plans to have 151 tourist beds available before the end of 2024. At the time there were 80 Ukrainians in the Seaview and Ó Muireagáin said that they had a six-month contract with the state to provide this accommodation.
He was somewhat vague as to what might happen once that initial contract was finished but said that they were pressing ahead on the basis that they would be ready to proceed with the development of the hotels as tourist accommodation after the six months.
The refugees are still there 16 months on, and there is little sign that Óstan Gweedore will host tourists this year either. One assumes therefore that the six-month contract has been renewed a number of times. There is no sign of the 80 jobs that were promised by Deputy Doherty and Vesada.
Vesada Private has other locations which are housing Ukrainian refugees. These include the Clew Bay Hotel in Mayo which was bought by Vesada in 2017. They also bought another Mayo hotel, the Pontoon Bridge, and that too is being used to house refugees. Their last accounts for both hotels up to October 2022 show minimal earnings.
That has obviously changed as the contracts for their hotels accommodation centres have pulled in large amounts of money.
In the third quarter of 2023, Vesada was paid €4,033,590 by the Department of Integration for just three months’ accommodation. That placed them in the top 20 earners in this very lucrative sector.
In total, the company has drawn down more than €11.5 million from asylum accommodation.
It is highly unlikely that any of the hotels involved would have earned anything approaching that amount in normal trade, and the cost of buying the hotels – €460,000 for the Pontoon Bridge – has been handsomely recouped.
The same applies to many others who have landed state contracts for both Ukrainian and International Protection accommodation. The local press in Mayo was told last August that renovations would begin in March this year and that the hotel would re-open to the public in 2025.
Vesada Private certainly lives up to their name. They were previously involved in attracting, successfully it appeared, Chinese investors who were able to acquire visa and residency rights in the Irish state in turn for large philanthropic endowments, of €500,000 or more, or investments of €1 million or more.
The Immigrant Investor Programme, was closed by Minister Simon Harris in February 2023, apparently on foot of concerns expressed by the bosses in Brussels. We know that the vast majority of applicants to the IIP were Chinese – and that the EU had concerns about immigrant investment schemes on the topics of “border security, money laundering, tax evasion and circumvention of EU law.”
The Vesada webpage that advertised its services to Chinese property investors is no longer with us, but it used to list Bunbeg Sea View as one of its projects. There is a Dublin telephone number listed on line as a contact for Vesada Private but several attempts to call were directed straight to a messaging service. An email that was previously in use is gone because the domain is no longer in use. All of the site links are likewise dormant.
So who are they?
Vesada Private Limited was registered as a new company in October 2015. The original directors were Frank Clinton, Desmond Connolly and Richard Heaney. The three shareholders in Vesada Private are Accs Morgan Investments which has a 25% shareholding and is owned by Ciaran Morgan/Ciarán Ó Muireagáin and Angela Morgan; FOC Consultancy which has 25% and is owned by Frank Clinton; and WV Consulting which is owned by Desmond and Jessica Connolly.
Clinton was formerly a director of Moate Medical Investments, owned by Richard Heaney, as well as two transport companies. Desmond Connolly was formerly a director with Ashjen, At Risk Electronics and Securway At Risk Security Limited. One of the other directors at Ashjen was Hugh Downes of At Risk.
Connolly was also a director along with Downes of H Downes Properties that was dissolved in 2006. Downes now owns a company called BGS Security which according to its accounts for 2022 and 2023 employed just two people but had a wage bill of over €2.3 million.
Vesada Private Limited had just 14 employees in 2022 but had current assets of just over €9 million. It wholly owns Bunbeg Revitalisation Limited which is directly responsible for the operation of the Donegal centres. The company was incorporated more than a year before the August 2020 announcement.
Bunbeg Property Limited, fully owned by Vesada, was set up at the time Doherty and Connolly announced the plan publicly. The Bunbeg Revitalisation financial statement for 2022 lists a Daphne Xiao as the owner of two of the holiday apartments. The apartments are occupied by Ukrainian refugees at the moment.
The Donegal Gaeltacht and other parts of the country where tourist beds are largely unavailable cannot afford to have the local economy effectively hogtied by wealthy investment funds and others who have chosen the easier option of state contracts.
It is surely time that those interests began to take priority for both the Government and the political supporters of the investors involved.