PR disasters - Dunnes Stores Better Value Beats Them All

FOR a moment or two this week, it was possible to feel a smidgeon of sympathy for Margaret Heffernan and Frank Dunne.

That was Wednesday morning when a little boy with an unusual name, his articulate mother and her pregnant colleagues achieved a double whammy through extensive mentions in the national press and on primetime radio with their simple story of principled protest and impoverishment.

"I can't afford a babysitter now I'm on strike ... The standing around just kills you if you're pregnant."

As pro union PR, it was classic stuff. What could be more emotive than small children and heavily pregnant women sweltering on a picket line? God help the Dunnes, muttered a few observers who felt a little uneasy about the imagery; how could they come up with an answer to that?

The answer is, with great difficulty. One time honoured way of doing it is to try to win the media to your side. For the media's part, it would be fair to say that down the years it has done its best to get on Mrs Heffernan's side.

Sure, she had hard questions to answer about industrial relations. But even her worst enemies were not unsympathetic to someone faced with the challenge she does running a company with 9,000 staff and a £1 billion turnover won in the teeth of ferocious competition; burdened with little formal education, a series of family tragedies and the deified spectre of her dead father.

There was even a time when some journalists felt she was being targeted in an unfairly personal manner, simply because she happened to be a wealthy woman with a perma tan, a fast car and a taste for glitzy clothes.

The trouble is that Mrs Heffernan's responses to these approaches have been less than helpful.

Last week, when she turned up at the talks, she was approached by Mark Costigan, a courteous but persevering radio reporter from FM104, intent on getting a management angle to balance the union line. He followed her on foot, maintaining a respectful distance as she drove round and round the car park in her navy sports Mercedes, doing everything to avoid him except the obvious - a dignified "I have nothing to say" usually does the trick - and eventually entering the building unimpeded.

Try ringing her on her mobile phone with a polite request for an interview, and someone who sounds very like her will tell you - after asking your name - that you have a wrong number.

Try ringing her at home and the phone may be slammed down.

Try approaching an intermediary with a formal request, and the suggestion is that both she and her brother, Frank, the only Dunnes left on the board of this huge, wholly owned Irish company, have made a lifelong pact never to speak to the media.

They have been obliged to make a few concessions to this century. Pat Heneghan will remembered as the PR man who persuaded the Dunne family last summer"to issue a press release for the first time in its history during a dispute.

The company now employs media advisers in the shape of Drury public relations.

But for the two Dunnes at the centre of the whirlwind, little else has changed since the days when hapless journalists - sometimes looking for no more than a few words about a new fashion line - had to listen while Ben senior or Junior trilled "Dunnes Stores Better Value Beats Them All" and nothing else down the phone.

On Wednesday, when the small boy, his mother and her pregnant colleagues starred on prime time radio and national newspapers, it might have been the signal for any other two enormously rich directors of any other company in the world either to surrender to the unions or sell up and head for the Caribbean. But these two are different; they are Dunnes. "They're not capable of cutting the cord that ties them into the stores, that ties them into their father," says one acquaintance.

"They are two people of a sort I have never dealt with before," says another, a well disposed, well travelled man who was privy to their thinking processes.

Since Ben's departure and the deaths of Elizabeth and Therese, Frank and Margaret have become "almost paralysed by one another in their mutual need to trade information with one another", he says.

Neither can do anything without fully appraising the other of the most minute detail.

BUT they are paralysed not only by one another but by their own attitudes and personality types.

Frank, says another source, can only take on one problem at a time: "And he absolutely has to see that problem all the way through, parcelled up and arriving at its destination before he can even consider moving on to something else."

This might explain why, for example, when RTE requested permission to film some happy footage of the stores back at work after last year's dispute, it took up to three days for the decision to come down from the board by which time it was too late.

In times of crisis, Margaret "very confident, self assured, but has never understood what it was to be told to do something" keeps referring back to her father - how, for example, he never recognised unions.

It has been suggested that last Sunday, when the crunch came, Margaret was in favour of pushing ahead with the agreement while Frank, characteristically, held out for more time.

A story is told how once, when presented with a proposal, the two adjourned to the boardroom to deliberate at length. They emerged later with the news that they had decided to reject it, adding bizarrely: "But we want it to be known that this was not a unanimous decision".

It is hardly surprising that they should have come to depend so thoroughly on each other. For the family, it has always been Dunnes Versus The World.

Now that they are only two, that feeling must be further distilled, magnified by the burden of being the only remaining spear carriers for past and future generations.

The word "feudal" crops up frequently in discussions about the family, reflected at one level in the subservient attitude of senior management. "They didn't appear to work as a team," says a source, band were apprehensive about making decisions."

A few years ago, Mrs Heffernan thought nothing of assembling staff in a store and asking them to pour out their grievances. At one point, Margaret was even turning her attention to private healthcare for the staff.

With the onset, meanwhile, of such practices as zero hour contracts and obligatory Sunday work, however, tales like this invite only scepticism now. What is beyond dispute is the private generosity of the Dunnes.

IN bringing on two outside board members, Margaret and Frank have been forced to face up to a scenario that only a few years ago must have constituted their worst nightmare - the possibility of the Dunnes being subsumed by outside directors.

Already, their two votes are equalled by two others. There is talk now of further outside directors coming on board, representing such areas as Finance, Marketing and interestingly Personnel. Dunnes Stores, private, monolithic, united, is no more.

Increasingly, their operations are opening up to outside scrutiny and an informed public (the company's most powerful support base) can see no good reason why Margaret Heffernan could not keep a deal with a man like Mandate's Owen Nulty, a devout Catholic in his 50s like herself a daily communicant, keen GAA fan, strict Pioneer, father of seven. Not exactly Danny the Red.