Barrett to add €50m Ashford to his empire

Galway businessman Gerry Barrett is poised to acquire Ashford Castle, the upmarket hotel in Co Mayo that has hosted personalities as diverse as Tony Blair, Ronald Reagan, Britt Ekland, Brad Pitt and Jerry Springer.

Mr Barrett, who last year acquired three of the Great Southern hotels, is in exclusive talks to buy the castle and its surrounding lands for a sum in excess of €50 million. His plans for the hotel are unknown.

Once a haunt of royalty - George V of England stayed there - Ashford has hosted figures as prominent on the international scene as Woody Allen, Pierce Brosnan, Johnny Cash, Sharon Stone, Alex Ferguson, Fred Astaire and Bob Hope.

Beneficiaries of the transaction will include the family of Sir Anthony O'Reilly, owner of a 20 per cent stake in the property, and a group of 40 Irish-American investors who acquired the business in 1985 from John A Mulcahy. Some members of that group have retired and some are said to be keen to realise the value of their investment.

Established as far back as 1228 and formerly owned by the Guinness family, the hotel came on the market earlier this year on foot of a number of unsolicited offers. Advisers KPMG were commissioned to evaluate the bids.

Already the owner of the G Hotel in Galway and the D Hotel in Drogheda, Mr Barrett did not return calls last evening. A former teacher, he is reputed to have spent some €140 million buying the Killarney, Eyre Square and Corrib Great Southern hotels last summer. Less than a month later, Mr Barrett sold on the Killarney hotel for €40 million to four local business people.

Highly active in the property market, Mr Barrett was refused permission by An Bord Pleanála earlier this month to build a five-star hotel in a former university residence on Hatch Street in central Dublin. He recently completed a quarter-acre residential development at Edward Square in Donnybrook.

He is owner of the former Bow Street magistrates court in London and was a backer of the Topaz consortium that bought the Irish operations of Shell oil and Statoil. That group has clawed back much of its original outlay by selling off sites in Dublin. Ashford Castle was in the possession of the Guinness family from 1852 until 1939, when it was acquired by Noel Huggard. He was the first to establish a hotel on the property. Director John Ford filmed The Quiet Man nearby in 1951 and many of the film's stars stayed there. A spokeswoman for the hotel last night declined to comment on the sale .