Maurice Pratt on Quinnsworth’s ‘enemy’ Ben Dunne

There were mornings in the 1980s when Maurice Pratt would open his newspaper to find full-page ads devoted to slagging him personally and his employer Quinnsworth.

The architect of those attack ads was Ben Dunne, a man Mr Pratt, frequently found himself going toe to toe with in the store wars of times past.

The man who for more than a decade was the face of the yellow pack kings of Ireland, notes that since his death at the weekend, Dunne has been quoted as saying “you had to have an enemy in business. And the enemy in the in those days was Quinnsworth because we were the biggest in terms of the number of stores.”

“What Ben did was personalise things by running advertisements mentioning his competitors directly and that was pretty much a no-no in those days. But he ran full-page ads which started with ‘My dear Quinnsworth’ and there’d be a photograph of myself there.”

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Mr Pratt did not take his starring role in the frequent attacks on Quinnsworth personally. “We were at war with each other, that’s how we all thought about it.”

He notes that in the 1980s Ireland “had a pretty depressed economy and money was tight. In a national context, you had Dunnes and you had Quinnsworth and a couple of others and there was pretty fierce price competition.”

Dunnes Stores, under the command of the late Dunne, were “very tough competitors and I would always pay them that tribute. They were unconventional and I used to think of them as being like a tiger in the long grass. They didn’t follow whatever the consensus was and because of that you had to expect the unexpected.”

Mr Pratt did not socialise with his main rival and they rarely spoke outside of industry events although he recalls one day in the 1980s just after the Quinnsworth-owned Crazy Prices opened in the new Square in Tallaght.

“Dunnes had a very significant store there but that opening weekend we got the lion’s share of the food business. I was in the store and Ben walked in. He could clearly see we were doing more business than he was so he came up to me and said ‘Do you know much money we took in this morning?’ He took a few coins out of his pocket and he said ‘that’s it’ and he said something along the lines of, well done to you guys.”

Two days later Dunnes Stores responded with a huge voucher deal that amounted to a 20 per cent discount largely designed to take those customers he had seen in the Square away from Quinnsworth.

“When we were planning anything we always had to think about how Dunnes would react and how we would react to the way Dunnes reacted,” he says. “That was part of the engagement and part of the fun and the enjoyment, the rough and tumble.”

He re-iterates that he and Dunne were rivals rather than friends but adds that he “met him a few times subsequently at golf events and on other occasions. He was very gregarious. He would have been characterised by a lot of people as a very demanding boss but he was also very generous to the people who worked hard for him and for the company. I just hope that comes out. Because sometimes an incorrect picture of the character that you’re talking about can be painted.”

When asked if he believes history will be kind to Dunne he pauses. “I don’t know but it should be kind to him. For a long time we were both part of the fabric of the Irish retail scene. But Dunnes Stores were there before we were. And they fed and clothed a very large part of the population for a very long time. Ben was a crucial part of that. We need characters like that in business in my opinion. We are all flawed in some way or other but I’d like to think that people will see that his legacy is part of what Dunnes has become and that is a tremendous retailer and as good as any retailer anywhere in the world.”