The unreliable AI-generated interview transcript on my phone thinks Matt Cooper’s new book Dynasty is about Dull Stories, which is exactly what the Dunnes Stores saga is not. Power battles, political fallout, a globally historic strike, a notorious cocaine blowout – the Dunnes drama has everything, including a cameo role for the IRA.
“Success, scandal and schisms, tragedy, disaster and disgrace” is how the Today FM broadcaster and Path to Power podcaster puts it on page one.
His slogan-invoking contention is that Dunnes is “simply better” than any other business story in the history of the State, and the Dunne family its most successful corporate dynasty.
So, I ask him, has anyone been in touch about a Netflix-style House of Dunne?
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“Not yet,” he says. He has been lured into some fantasy-casting conversations, typically involving mention of Brendan Gleeson, but thinks it’s “such an Irish story” it might not translate.
Cooper remembers not believing the Sunday Tribune’s 1992 scoop on Ben Dunne’s humiliating arrest for drug offences in a hotel in Orlando, Florida, when he saw it. Then a young journalist with the Sunday Business Post, he had heard industry talk that the Tribune was preparing a redesign.
“I was out with friends at home in Cork the night before, and when I staggered downstairs the next morning and looked at my parents’ papers there before me, I thought: ‘Jesus Christ, they’re after publishing the dummy [mock-up] edition.’ This can’t be real.”
Not only was it real, there were more “what the hell” headlines about Dunne’s golfing holiday to come. This set in train events that began with his ousting from Dunnes, culminating in years of tribunals into payments made to Charles Haughey and Michael Lowry.
Cooper was initially approached to write a biography of Dunne after he died in November 2023. “But when I started thinking about it, I thought ‘there’s a bigger story here than just Ben’.”
The story, he decided, should also be that of the wider Dunne family, in particular Ben’s media-averse sister Margaret Heffernan (83). She is the eldest of six children born to Ben Dunne snr and his wife Nora Dunne (née Maloney), who has transformed Dunnes into the retailer it is today.
“And when I got into it, it struck me that it’s a great story about Ireland and how we’ve changed,” says Cooper.
Delving into newspaper archives, he discovered that the family’s policy of not engaging with the media – adhered to by everyone except Liveline-frequenting Ben – hadn’t always been in place. Ben Dunne snr even staged press conferences, once discussing his strategy for responding to the shortening length of women’s skirts.
In his compelling and often revelatory history, Cooper outlines how a high volume of press coverage generated by two forgotten 1960s court cases – which saw the acquittal of six young Dunnes workers arrested for shoplifting – was the likely catalyst for the family’s subsequent distaste for publicity and intransigent style of industrial relations.
Despite many flashpoints, most consumers never shunned the retailer, not even in 1984 when it suspended checkout operator Mary Manning for refusing to handle goods from South Africa, sparking a landmark three-year strike by a group of Dunnes workers.
“Isn’t that interesting as well? Everyone would say they supported the anti-apartheid workers, but it didn’t stop people going into Dunnes in ever increasing numbers.”
Although he has seen and said hello to Heffernan in the Swan Centre in Rathmines over the years, she “sort of ignores” him, he says. She did not reply either to his texts or a letter, hand-delivered to Dunnes head office, requesting an interview for Dynasty.
Cooper shops at the Swan Centre’s Dunnes – it’s close to the home he shares with his wife, Parentline chief executive Aileen Hickie, and four of their five children – but didn’t always. “I never used to until they did it up in the last decade.”
This push to revamp stores, introduce mid-market brands and attract new customers is part of Heffernan’s legacy. The latter chapters of Dynasty, devoted to her reign (32 years and counting), also feature an unflattering portrait of how Dunnes has used the legal system to assert its power. But by the metric of pure business success, Cooper is unequivocal: no Irish woman has done more.
“It’s hard to think of many Irish men who have been more successful. To have maintained family ownership with no dilution after 80 years, to have done it in circumstances in which the siblings were squabbling, and to have also majorly changed Dunnes Stores, is a phenomenal achievement.”
That her leadership prowess wasn’t recognised by her father was, unsurprisingly, a product of prevailing attitudes to women.
“His two sons, Frank and Ben, had major problems, but it was always the idea that the boys take over.”
He could be very amiable and gregarious. He had that sort of personality that drew people to him, as long as you didn’t fall out with him
— Matt Cooper on Ben Dunne jnr
Frank, who died in 2022, encouraged his father to make sound property development choices in the 1960s and 1970s, but had struggles with alcohol.
For Cooper, it is likely that Ben “would have had his own issues” with addiction even without the defining event of his life: his kidnapping for ransom by the IRA in October 1981. It is never easy to be the child of a mogul.
“Ben was obsessed, I think, with proving himself. I think it’s quite clear that Ben snr and Nora didn’t really have a relationship with their children as children. They had a relationship with them from their teenage years onwards as future owners and managers of the company.”
But because the Florida story was “sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” – the rock ‘n’ roll provided by U2, who happened to be staying in the same hotel – the importance of the kidnapping is sometimes underplayed, Cooper says.
“If you’re doing a biography of Ben, you have to acknowledge that the kidnapping is actually more significant to his life, and the rest of the stuff that happened, well, who knows, but it might not have happened without the kidnapping.”
Held hostage for almost a week, then released, Dunne returned to work the next day at the insistence of his father, receiving no counselling. Volatile behaviour and cocaine followed.
Cooper spoke with him many times in the 1990s. On one memorable occasion, he drove out to his house in Porterstown in west Dublin after he was dethroned from the family company. Haughey, the former taoiseach, rang Dunne when Cooper was in the room.
What did he make of Dunne?
“He could be very amiable and gregarious. He had that sort of personality that drew people to him, as long as you didn’t fall out with him,” he says. At one point, Dunne started telling him what to write and Cooper had to remind him he was not his PR man.
“He was just sort of used to the idea that he could tell people what to do.”
Cooper is from Cork, the city where the first Dunnes Stores opened in March 1944, but that link was never to the fore, perhaps because the family, sensing opportunity, abandoned Cork for Dublin.
“When I knew Ben [jnr], I’m not sure Cork ever really featured in our conversations.”
A crunch point looms, not least because it is unclear how long the third generation of Dunnes directors, Heffernan’s daughter Anne Heffernan (57) and her niece Sharon McMahon (55), will want to continue or who comes after them.
“After Margaret finally lets go of it, who knows what?”
As for what’s next for Cooper, I meet him near the end of a presidential election campaign that has lured new listeners to Path to Power, his podcast with Ivan Yates.
[ Matt Cooper’s acerbic presidential election remark pays offOpens in new window ]
This was thanks to Yates’s much-repeated, much-hashtagged remark – made on a separate Newstalk podcast – that he would have advised Fine Gael, if asked, to “smear the bejaysus” out of Catherine Connolly.
“The usual inadvertent Ivan thing. I think he felt he had to say something to justify what Newstalk were paying him for that podcast, but what he actually did was help the numbers for Path to Power. I was sort of slagging him, saying I’d never have allowed him to say that on our podcast.”
His co-host’s claim in 2023 that the pair had signed “the biggest sponsorship deal ever” for an Irish podcast “wasn’t quite true”, he admits, but Path to Power is financially worth its while.
He has other important business to complete the weekend after the election – he will be out of contract at Today FM at the end of 2025 and has a new offer to review.
“We’ve already done basically a handshake deal. I just need to go through the contract. But they are committed to the programme for another three years with me at the helm as presenter and editor.”
“They” are the German-owned Bauer Media Audio, which acquired Today FM and the rest of Denis O’Brien’s Communicorp radio group in 2021, resurrecting the question of whether The Last Word with Matt Cooper, the only current affairs programme on the station, would survive.
“I’ve lost count of the times that there has been speculation as to whether the programme would continue, or whether I would continue. For some reason, I’m still there.”
Indeed, his occupancy of drivetime since January 2003, where he has 181,000 listeners, is a constant of Irish radio.
We discuss other media trends, from the rise of video podcasts to the popularity of audiobooks. He’s baffled that as many people watch Path to Power on YouTube as listen on Apple and Spotify combined – “Like, what?” – and sounds incredulous as he describes people telling him they’ve listened to the Dynasty audiobook (which he voiced himself).
“I love the printed word,” he says. It’s the newspaper man in him. He was editor of the Sunday Tribune from 1996 until 2002 and his 14 years in the industry were happy ones.
“It was only the frustrations on the business side that persuaded me to take the jump and try radio. I mean, I was so lucky that I did, and I say that as somebody who still loves reading newspapers.”
Cooper (59) still writes newspaper columns because he likes “having the chats with the editors every week”, and not just about what he’s going to write. “I do feel sad that newspapers have probably diminished in the national consciousness compared to where they used to be.”
Dynasty is his seventh book, and he has “a list” of business figures whose biography he would like to write for his eighth. He is “a bit of a sucker” for business stories, he says. His shrewd telling of extraordinary drama at Dunnes Stores may well convert a few more.
Dynasty by Matt Cooper is published by Eriu
