February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Mark Nolan is never happy. But that’s a good thing, he believes, if you’re the managing director of a five-star hotel.
He’s seen the trait often in the business he’s worked in throughout his adult life. “There’s that constant drive,” said Nolan, who oversees 200 employees at Dromoland Castle in County Clare.
“We’re always trying to improve the product,” he said. “We’re always striving for perfection. We never get there. If you think you are there, then the guy in the next hotel is going to show you that you’re wrong.”
For now, though, his hotel is ahead of the competition. And for a time last year, it was center of the world.
President Bush stayed at Dromoland Castle and met European leaders there during the U.S./EU in June.
Nolan stressed that teamwork is also important to Dromoland’s success. “All of my management people have been with me for eight years. That can be a positive thing and but also construed as a bad thing,” he said, laughing. “But it does work.”
Nolan warns those who are interested that his resume is rather brief and unexciting. If it is, then it’s because his rise to the top was so rapid.
In 1989, when he 29, he was appointed general manager of Dromoland Castle, which is owned by the Dromoland Castle Owners Association, a group of Irish and Irish-American investors. Four years later, he became managing director of the hotel.
It all began by chance when he was on vacation at his family’s summer house in County Mayo, on the lake near Ashford Castle.
“I was a bored 17-year-old,” said Nolan, who is now married with four children. “They [his parents] said to me: ‘Would you ever get a job, or do something! We want to enjoy our holiday, too.’
“I then met up with a friend who I played tennis with and he said I should apply to Ashford Castle. He told me: ‘It’s impossible for them to get staff at the moment.’ So I did apply and started work the next day.”
That summer job in the hotel’s restaurant changed his life.
“I never looked back,” he said. “I knew that this was exactly what I wanted to do.”
After he left Dublin’s Gonzaga College, a Jesuit high school, Nolan did a course in hotel management at the Regional Technical College in Galway. Upon graduation, he got a scholarship to work with the Dunphy Hotel group in New York.
“I enjoyed it, but on a scholarship you have no cash. And New York when you’ve no cash is a kind of torture,” he said.
Nolan, who also worked in the Arabella Hotel in Frankfurt, took a six-month time-out to work with RTE studios as a dresser and buyer of property sets. “I was always interested in interior design,” he said.
But hotels, it seems, were Nolan’s destiny, particularly Dromoland Castle.
The hotel’s own most famous rendezvous with history came with the presidential visit. Inevitably, the world’s press descended on the venue, which is just eight miles from Shannon airport. So, too, did 3,500 gardai from stations all over the country (clocking up 169,021 hours of overtime in the process) and 2,000 soldiers of the Irish army.
“We all got to meet [the president] and his wife individually,” Nolan said. And the president went out of his way to meet the staff and from that point of view, it went down very well.”
Ex-President Bill Clinton and Sen. Hillary Clinton have stayed a couple of occasions.
“He has an amazing aura when he comes up the steps,” Nolan said of the 42nd American president. “Even out of office, there’s a palpable feeling of power about him. There’s a real buzz when he’s here. And the staff just love to have him here.”
However, the guest that has made the greatest impression is neither Irish nor American.
“When Nelson Mandela stayed [in 2000], there was nearly a religious feeling here about the hotel,” he said. “There was a reverential silence. He’s such a wonderful man.”
Even Nolan’s youngest daughter, Gillian, then 6, sensed she was meeting a great man and the family cherishes the photographic record of her presenting him with a bouquet of flowers. However, Mandela’s question about whether she wanted to be a president when she grew up went right over her head.
John Travolta is another popular guest with the staff. “He’s a super nice guy, always very appreciative of our efforts,” he said.
Indeed, a veritable Hollywood who’s who has stayed at Dromoland Castle: Robin Williams, Robert Redford, Bruce Willis, Dennis Hopper, Quentin Tarantino, Angelica Huston and Brooke Shields among them.
Many Americans [54 percent of the guests in 2004 were from the U.S.] are attracted to the Castle’s association with the ancient Gaelic order. From at least the middle of the 16th century, it was a seat of the O’Brien clan.
In time, the family became part of the Protestant gentry, though its best-known member, William Smith O’Brien, led the 1848 Rebellion.
Smith O’Brien’s father, Sir Edward O’Brien, was the moving force behind the 1820s and 1830s reconstruction of Dromoland