Gerald strikes gold in United Arab Emirates

City Lives – Denise McNamara meets Gerald Lawless, manager of Dubai’s famous ‘seven-star’ Burj Al Arab Hotel

He may run 22 of the swishest hotels on the planet and be responsible for 13,000 staff, but Gerald Lawless has no problem hopping the Go Bus down from the Dublin Airport to return to his home town.

However, that is not to say that the Dangan native has been untouched by his international jet-setting. As we organised our rendezvous ahead of a talk to his old Alma Mater and days before his participation in the Global Irish Economic Forum at Dublin Castle, he enquired if a photographer would be on hand.

“Good,” he sighed, on learning there would be no camera. “I’m only dressed in a t-shirt.”

A t-shirt it may have been, but Gerald – or Gerry as people call him about town – looked every inch the debonair businessman.

The perfectly groomed black t-shirt was ensconced in an elegant dark designer suit, with the shiniest black shoes. With his silver hair and silver moustache, Gerald would certainly look at home tucking into the infamous €100 afternoon tea in his most famous hotel, the Burj Al Arab, which urban myth has designated the world’s only seven-star establishment.

But this afternoon it is the Meyrick Hotel we are sitting in for a coffee, the place where his entire career was kick-started.

“I came to the Great Southern in December 1970 and was working in the kitchen with the pastry chef JJ. I loved this hotel; it was when the Great Southern was in its heyday. Rory Murphy was the manager; he went to Ashford for years and years. There was great training, you got a great start. The Claddagh Grill on the top floor was the most high-class restaurant in Galway at the time; it had this tiny kitchen and Cecil Collins and myself used to more or less run it between us.”

Gerald was the first in his family to go into the hospitality industry.

His father Tom Lawless and his brothers Peter and Jack farmed the land in Dangan opposite Menlo Castle.

While at school in Coláiste Iognáid it was history and English that he most loved. He recalls being teased mercilessly for playing the character Fanny Fezziwig in the play, A Christmas Carol. But his fondest memories from ‘the Jes’ are water related.

“Rowing, rowing, rowing, that’s what I remember most about the Jes. In fact The Connacht Sentinel had a picture of us in our rowing gear recently; the only thing I was really upset about was the caption: Days Gone By,” he smiles.

It was also how he met his wife, Neasa McDonagh, from Devon Gardens in Salthill.

“She was about to start university – she got a better Leaving than I did – she was rowing in a regatta and traditionally you throw the cox in the river. She wasn’t the cox but I threw her in anyway. That got her attention. We’re married 39 years this year.”

For more read this week’s Galway City Tribune.