PROFILE: DJ CAREY and SARAH NEWMAN:Even the most popular, positive and talented can't escape the perils of this recession, as the financial travails of DJ Carey and his partner, Sarah Newman, showed this week. KEITH DUGGANreports
FOR HURLING PEOPLE it came as a shock to see the iconic name back in newsprint. Since DJ Carey bowed out of the game with his customary grace in 2006 he had largely retreated from a public gaze that first fixed upon him when he was a teenager. And for entrepreneurs the notion that Sarah Newman, a businesswoman who made an actual rather than notional fortune from a bright dotcom idea, could become caught up in a failing business venture must seem like a chilling portent of the times. The stark financial situation of a couple whose lives were the stuff of shimmering success is just the latest example of the random hardships that are sweeping the country.
Carey’s cleaning business, painstakingly built up since he founded it in 1994, is reported to have run into financial difficulties. The previous phone number for DJ Carey Enterprises is now answered by Western Hygiene, a cleaning company based in Co Galway.
Sarah Newman, who has become a well-known face through her participation in RTÉ's entrepreneurial show Dragons' Den,is said in her biography for that show to be running "a successful business, DJ Carey Enterprises", together with Carey.
This recent misfortune thrusts Carey back into the intense public scrutiny that he learned to live with throughout his hurling life. It is easy to forget the aura that emanated from him during his 15 years as a hurler with Kilkenny. It wasn’t quite superstardom, not in the celebrity sense; it was too fierce and too intense for that. When, in 1998, Carey suddenly retired at the age of 27, he received 25,000 letters within a fortnight asking him to reconsider. Consider that: 25,000 people, mostly strangers, asking him to keep going. In essence he was not permitted to retire. The date is significant: in 1998 Ireland was on the cusp of change, but it still moved relatively sedately. Carey was one of the most thrilling manifestations of what being Irish meant.
It wasn’t just the extraordinary tour de force that he inflicted on the Galway team in 1997 or his ingenious All-Ireland final goal – just the faintest glance off his hurley to direct the falling sliotar into the goal – against Clare five years later. It was the sense that even though his hurling greatness was predestined from his boarding days at St Kieran’s, he unerringly made it happen. His prodigious talent was a local whisper that soon went national.
He was a quiet enough kid who could look after himself: in school, tiring of his classmates robbing his sandwiches for amusement as much as hunger, he made up a round with nappy-rash ointment Sudocrem replacing mayonnaise, and that ended that. His formative years revolved around hurling. The gable where the Dodger practised as boy became something of a shrine. He was shy but affable and, like many pre-eminent sports people, he seemed to have an inherent understanding that people would want to meet him, talk with him, be near him.
He had the rare ability to talk openly about his stature within the game while always sounding modest. After Kilkenny games, major or minor, he could normally be found still signing autographs in his gear as the light failed.
Arguments raged about his place in the game: some championed him as the greatest hurler ever to play; the contrary opinion was that he was overrated. Carey was omitted from the Hurling Team of the Millennium and he responded to the sly critique that he had never played well in an All-Ireland final with a beautiful performance in 2002.
It was during the All-Ireland final weekend of the following year that Carey got caught in the crossfire between what the country was and what it would soon become. On the Sunday of the game a tabloid newspaper was expected to publish a story about the breakdown of Carey’s marriage. The will-they-won’t-they-do-him saga became a shameful subplot to one of the great celebratory weeks in Irish sport.
“What was happening in September,” he said afterwards, “was that reporters and papers were on the streets and in bars offering money for stories about me. Cash to come up with a story. I found that mind-boggling and scary, billion-dollar corporations going after a small fry from rural Ireland because he has a profile in an amateur sport.” In the end, the story didn’t run. That afternoon Carey won his fifth and final All-Ireland medal.
Sarah Newman, meanwhile, had fashioned a spectacular business career from a new idea and an old-fashioned work ethic. Raised in Essex, Newman had worked in the travel business since the age of 16 and was living in Ireland when, in 1994, she saw the potential for a hotel bookings company. Initially she persuaded Ryanair to allow her to work from a desk in its call centre, offering hotel deals to customers, working long hours and raising two children alone as she built the company that became Needahotel.com. Her business idea was the perfect confluence of a smart online product with a decade defined by manic travel and hotel-themed leisure breaks.
But Newman, crucially, knew exactly when her business had reached its apex. In 2006 she sold her business for an undisclosed figure believed to be in the region of €50 million. By then she and Carey were partners. In a 2007 interview, she said that Carey was, above anyone, her mentor.
“I know that sounds a bit cheesy but, genuinely, he’s the one person whose opinion I would most value,” she said. “He’s a very level-headed, logical, stable, feet-on-the-ground type of guy and he would have added a completely different dimension to the way I approach business.”
The couple became open about their relationship around 2004, appearing together on a trip to South Africa in RTÉ's holiday programme No Frontiers.But through her role in Dragons' DenNewman became a role model for many entrepreneurs, demonstrating her clear judgment about new ideas and an obvious passion for business. She continued to diversify as a businesswoman, from setting up a hurley-making factory in Slovakia to completing Chalet Grace, an opulent skiing chalet which is available for rent.
Carey and Newman live in Monkstown and also own a property at Mount Juliet Golf Club in Co Kilkenny. They each have two children from previous marriages.
The Kilkenny hurling team embarked on a quest for five All-Ireland titles in a row after Carey’s retirement, accelerating the sense that he belonged to an earlier era. He is no longer involved in top-level hurling but he occasionally speaks at GAA conferences and has always given his time to clubs.
The problems of his business make him one of the most high-profile casualties of a savage recession in which company closures are a daily occurrence. But when most people hear Carey’s name, they will think not of a mortal businessman but of the elusive figure in black and amber.
Curriculum vitae
Who are they?Hurling star DJ Carey and his partner, entrepreneur and Dragons' Den star Sarah Newman.
Why are they in the news?Three of their companies, DJ Carey Enterprises, Alton and Dublin Janitorial Centre, are in financial crisis. A creditors' meeting has been called for February 18th.
Most appealing characteristic?Their open, can-do attitude towards, sport, business and life.
Least appealing characteristic?It was hardly their fault, but they made glittering success appear almost too easy.
Most likely to say?"Our first concern is for our staff."
L east likely to say?"There is no way back from this."
