A third generation of the Loughran family has taken over the running of the Sandymount Hotel in Dublin 4, 71 years after its doors were first opened to guests.
Recently filed accounts for Mount Herbert Ltd and its parent company, Loughran Investments, reveal that hotel director Gerard Loughran has taken ownership of the ordinary shares in the business from his father, John Loughran, who retired last year.
In a 2025 restructuring of the company behind the 190-bedroom hotel, two of Gerard Loughran’s three siblings – Oisín and Sinéad – were also issued a new class of preference shares in the business.
[ Budget 2027: All you need to knowOpens in new window ]
Speaking to The Irish Times, John Loughran said there are no voting rights attached to the preference shares and Gerard, who has worked in the hotel for 20 years, is “free to run the business as he sees fit”. John is also retaining some preference shares in the company “in the event I need a few bob in the future”, he said.
READ MORE
Mount Herbert Ltd has also acquired one of the hotel’s eight buildings from John Loughran’s wife, Audrey Loughran, for about €5.7 million, according to the filings.
John Loughran said the proceeds were used to pay taxes associated with the transfer of the business – including capital gains tax, capital acquisitions tax (CAT) and stamp duty – in the order of about €4.5 million. He said the company, which had accumulated profits of more than €13 million by the end of last year, was in a “fortunate” position.
Formerly called the Mount Herbert Hotel before being renamed in 2011, the property sits about 200m from the Aviva Stadium. It comprises eight Victorian buildings, which were first converted into a four-bedroom hotel by John Loughran’s Tyrone-born parents, Gerard and Rosaleen, in 1955.
John and his brother Paul inherited the business before John bought out his sibling’s shareholding in 1999. He has stewarded the business through difficult times, including the post-2008 property crash and financial crisis, narrowly avoiding the appointment of receivers to the hotel.
Ireland’s economic outlook ahead of Budget 2027 and agentic AI going rogue
However, Loughran said that when it came time to pass the torch to his children, the process was anything but smooth.
“I was coming up to my 66th birthday in 2021,” he said. “There were Government incentives to transition a family business where you got business relief [for CAT], and you got retirement relief [for CGT] if you transition the business before you are 66.”
At the time, there was a €3 million cap on the value of business assets that could be transferred within families tax-free for those aged 66 or older.
“Then Covid hit, and it was off the table, so the window of opportunity had passed,” he said.
Loughran said he contacted the Department of Finance in 2024 to lobby for an extension of the retirement age, which led to a meeting with officials. “I said my business is going to go to foreign ownership, when it could remain an Irish family-owned and run business because there won’t be an Irish buyer for this hotel,” he recalled.
Due to its reputation and prime location, the hotel has had countless suitors over the years, Loughran said, including some “big offers”. However, he said that he felt he had a duty to his “legacy staff” – the longest-serving of whom has been with the business for 46 years – to maintain family control.
“I don’t see this – and Gerard would be of the same view – as an asset that you flip,” he said. “It is the livelihoods of 130 people.”
In Budget 2025, the Government moved to raise the age at which the €3 million cap applies from 66 to 70. The reforms came into effect in January 2025, giving the Loughrans five months to complete the transfer before John’s 70th birthday that May.
“The fact that I had a motorbike accident in February and was off the page for a month didn’t help things,” he said. “But anyway, we just about got it done.”
Loughran said that due to inheritance tax rules, Gerard is “handcuffed” to the business for 12 years, meaning it will “remain an Irish family-owned and run business” for years to come.
Even with the changes to the CGT regime, the experience of dividing a family business was challenging, Loughran said, and costly. “Whereas other countries recognise the value of family-owned businesses and have policies and tax incentives to support them, that’s not really the case in Ireland,” he said.
Still, Loughran said the hotel is lucky to have traded well in 2025 and into 2026. Mount Herbert Ltd reported turnover of €9.8 million in 2025, up by about 5 per cent year-on-year. The company also swung to an almost €1.4 million profit last year from a loss of close to €688,000 in 2024.
He put the turnaround down to a sizeable drop in administrative costs related to pension transfers that were conducted in 2024, which dragged on the hotel’s bottom line in that year.
“The other big cost, which won’t be there in 2026, is probably close to €200,000 of professional fees,” which were paid to three different advisory firms in the run-up to the transition. “I was paying handsomely for three conflicting opinions,” Loughran said.
“So the business as it sits now and moves forward into the next generation is in a strong place,” he added. “It’s debt-free. I suppose I learned my lessons from the financial crash.”
