Meet the Kenmare family who bought their hotel back from John and Francis Brennan

“Patrick and I very much believe in serendipity,” says hotelier Aileen Hanley, and well, the Kenmare-based duo might. The stars began to align for the entrepreneurial couple back in May of 2023, manifesting an opportunity they had long dreamed about.

“People started sending us messages,” recalls Aileen as she cites one particular text “from the horse’s mouth” that gave veracity to the chatter they’d been hearing about The Lansdowne.

Previously known as the Lansdowne Arms, the hotel on Kenmare’s Main St was where Patrick Hanley had grown up; his parents, Breda and Bobby, had run it for almost three decades, before selling it on in 2000 when they retired. The historic property — built in 1790 as a residence for the second Earl of Shelburne — was back on the market, having been refurbished and run by hoteliers John and Francis Brennan since 2020, and the time was right for the husband and wife team to go for it.

Equally excited to see the all-important “it’s for sale” text was Breda Hanley.

“Her face was just priceless,” Aileen recalls. “She said, ‘we’re going to get it back, aren’t we? Aren’t we going to get it back?’ The two of us said, ‘we’ll do our best’. And so we took it from there and got the ball rolling and thankfully it all paid off.”

Kenmare native Patrick Hanley returns home with his wife Aileen Hanley to take the reins of The Lansdowne Kenmare Hotel – 24 years after his parents sold the business. Photo By: Domnick Walsh

Since 2006, the year Aileen and Patrick had met and fallen for each other while working in Co Meath’s Bellinter House, the two had shared a vision.

“From day one, we always wanted our own property,” Aileen says.

They succeeded in that aim, opening The Strand Cahore, a seaside restaurant in Co Wexford in January of 2018. They both have decades of hospitality experience.

“I’m in this industry since I was 13,” Aileen says. “My grandparents owned the Hill of Tara in Co Meath. They were the last private owners; it was sold by compulsory purchase in 1975. There’s a little coffee shop at the top, Maguires, and I worked there from the age of 13, all the way through college.”

She studied accounting and finance at Dublin Business School “to have a grounding in that field, so that I could open my own business one day”, but was always set on a career in hospitality, as was Patrick — who studied at the world-renowned Shannon College of Hotel Management, and is from a long line of hoteliers.

“My mam’s family had a small hotel in Glengarriff, which was run by her uncle. She worked there from a very young age and eventually she inherited that property,” he says. “At the same time, my father was growing up in Kenmare and studied hospitality in Shannon in the 60s. He did his placements in Switzerland and the Caribbean. Then mam and dad met in Kenmare and Glengarriff at the old-school ballroom of romance dances.”

Kenmare native Patrick Hanley returns home with his wife Aileen Hanley to take the reins of The Lansdowne Kenmare Hotel – 24 years after his parents sold the business. Photo By: Domnick Walsh

Bobby Hanley bought the Lansdowne Arms in 1972. He and Breda put their heart and soul into running the property, which is one of the oldest buildings in the Co Kerry town. The family only took holidays in the winter off-season, Patrick recalls, with Bobby and Breda keeping tabs on the goings-on at the Lansdowne all the while via phone and fax, and never venturing further afield than Scotland, just in case.

Until the age of about seven, Patrick had a bedroom over the hotel lobby: “On Friday and Saturday nights, there’d be music. I have vivid memories of getting out of my bed, and standing at the top of the stairs, calling for my mam. And maybe a customer would be walking by and they’d look up and see me and say, ‘I’ll get your mam now’.”

Breda would duly arrive minutes later to tuck her mischievous son back into bed.

Patrick had no inclination to take over the hotel when Bobby and Breda were retiring. He was only 21, the time just wasn’t right, he says, and destiny had other plans for him anyway, as Aileen points out: “Breda always says, ‘He never would have met you if we hadn’t sold it’.”

Breda and Bobby “enjoyed a fantastic retirement”.

“Sometimes when you run a small business like a hotel, people let it run them into the ground, and they didn’t do that,” Patrick says. “They got to enjoy a nice retirement and a long one.”

Sadly, Bobby died in 2014, but Breda, who now lives with Patrick and Aileen, is thriving and happily “gives her opinion” on all things Lansdowne.

“She just loves talking about it, her time in it, and we love listening,” Aileen says, adding that the pastry chef from Bobby and Breda’s tenure is now back doing all the hotel’s pastries. “And oh my God, the stories! Herself and Breda together is just brilliant craic.”

Kenmare native Patrick Hanley returns home with his wife Aileen Hanley to take the reins of The Lansdowne Kenmare Hotel – 24 years after his parents sold the business. Photo By: Domnick Walsh

While the Brennan brothers gave the Lansdowne a “fantastic facelift”, Patrick and Aileen have been putting their own stamp on the property since they took over in January of last year.

“We’ve put our own personality onto that canvas that John provided us with. And John loves it,” Aileen says. “We have a fantastic relationship. It’s lovely when he comes in and says, ‘I love now what you did with that’.”

She and Patrick have added “more colour and the soft cushions and different bits and pieces”. Some of those are little time capsules that have been unearthed in the hotel’s attic, such as Patrick’s old Elvis posters.

“When Patrick unrolled them,” Aileen says, “he got quite emotional because he was transported back to being in his childhood bedroom.”

They’re a luxury hotel, but their vision of luxury isn’t gilded grandeur, rather it’s the feeling that envelops you when you step through the door.

“And that comes from our amazing, friendly team,” Aileen says. “And that’s what we want. We want people to feel really good when they walk in, rather than, ‘oh my God, look at that chandelier’. That’s not what we’re about.”

Despite the relentless demands on their time, the Hanleys still strive for a work-life balance, carving out “little pockets” of time to spend together or recharging their batteries. A 5.30pm dinnertime with the kids is sacred.

“If we can’t get out of the hotel, we’ll bring them down to us and we’ll sit and we’ll have dinner with them in the hotel, and that’s really important to us,” says Patrick.

Technology makes life easier than it was in Bobby and Breda’s day, he adds, and enables them to do a certain amount of remote working, but the calibre of their staff is also key to their success: “We have excellent people in both locations who we trust implicitly.”

The Kenmare community has welcomed them back with open arms.

“From January [of last year], when we came in, it was like we got married, there were so many flowers in the lobby,” Aileen recalls. “It was such an emotional couple of weeks, people were coming in crying, hugging us, shaking our hands, telling stories about Bobby and Breda; it was just amazing.”

That August was the 10th anniversary of Bobby Hanley’s passing, so Aileen and Patrick decided to put on an event and invite the whole community.

“Bobby was best friends with John B Keane, so his family came down; there was singing, there was poetry, it was just amazing,” Aileen says. “That’s the fabric of Kenmare: Singing, poetry, support.”

“Whether times are good or times are bad, people come together,” adds Patrick. “It’s a great town. It’s a great community. Everyone supports everyone, and we all say, ‘rising tides sail all boats’.”

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