The Reenroe Hotel

By Patrick McCarthy

Halfway around the circumference of Ballinskelligs Bay, a rocky promontory rises and juts out into the bay, facing the Atlantic Ocean and surrounded by sandy beaches on either side. On top of this headland is a concrete structure, sitting at practically the geographical center point of the bay and the Inny Valley, its striking geometrical shape easily recognizable from every corner around the bay and surrounding mountains. Visitors to the area have often asked me about the building and its oddly privileged location. By appearance, the concrete bunker, a showpiece of brutalist architecture, seems to them like an abandoned factory, maybe a chemical laboratory, or even a criminal penitentiary. The only things missing are the towering smokestacks and barbed wire fences. Most are very surprised to learn it was once a luxury hotel: and for a few years the social as well as physical center of the neighborhood.

Today the Reenroe Hotel may be an eerie, skeletal ruin, but in my childhood it had a more exotic, glamorous appeal. It was a modern urban construct standing in the middle of rustic countryside. And it was a connection to the world outside of South Kerry, the place to go to make international phone calls, buy foreign newspapers, watch videos of current movies, and listen for strange accents. Many mornings my father would send me walking across Reenroe strand to pick up the Irish Times from the reception desk. The silhouette of the hotel on top of the cliffs made an attractive destination. Once there I would be at least guaranteed to see something new and different.

The Reenroe Hotel was named after the promontory: an Anglicization of the Irish rinn rua – red headland. The hotel first opened in 1972, but its history begins over a decade earlier, when Waterville hotelier Billy Huggard purchased the property from the McCarthy family. His ambitious plans for the hotel are recorded in “The Importance of Being Irish”, a sociological portrait of mid-century Ireland by journalist Alan Bestic. In his chapter on tourism, Bestic describes the Reenroe project as an example of the rapidly growing and modernizing tourism industry in Ireland. In the 1960s, tourism tripled.

Townhouse hotels squeezed into town centers that lacked parking facilities, swimming pools and forcing guests to all share the same bathroom were no longer cutting the mustard. Blueprints for the new hotel changed to reflect the new reality. It was to be a contemporary, custom built, idyllic country resort. Even before ground was broken, Huggard spent years developing the surrounding area. Bestic describes in detail how earth-movers transformed the headland, digging out artificial coves to serve as intimate swimming holes for the hotel guests. Stone staircases and boat slips were built into the cliffs. In the coves one can still find the remains of one of the project’s more unusual features: a sea level, salt water swimming pool. With a concrete wall guarding one side and the cliff face on the other, the idea was that the incoming tide would constantly refill the pool. The plumbing never quite worked out the way the architect hoped. The tide would deposit seawater into the pool, along with seaweed, jellyfish, tin cans and the occasional dead bird, none of which would filter out with the tide afterward. The wall did serve as a convenient sunbathing deck for most of the hotel’s history though.

Huggard also hoped to alter the history of the headland as well as its geography. Local artisan Dan Padraig McCarthy built a half dozen stone huts around the property. They were all constructed in the style of Early-Christian beehive huts, or clochans. They may have intended to add some cultural color to the site and have fooled a few amateur archaeologists. Unlike most real clochans, their doorways were impractically large and wide-open; I suspect to discourage people from spending the night in them or using them for restrooms or romantic assignations. I don’t believe they were successful in that. The huts were exceptionally well built in any case, several outlasting the hotel itself.

The hotel was another case. Designed in the 1960s, it embraced some of the worst elements of that era of architecture. It was a collection of brutalist concrete blocks that didn’t even pretend to fit into the environment, but proudly stood in contrast to it. Bedrooms were all identical and quarantined off to one side. The furniture was minimalist and identical throughout the entire hotel. The seats in the bar were very low to the ground, great for kids, but impossible for folks of a certain age or size to get out of them once they had sat down, perhaps, that was the idea. For some unclear reason, the kitchens, staff rooms and delivery areas were all placed on the ocean side of the hotel, leaving the guests in the bar and lounge on the northern side to look out on the parking lot. I imagine that they wished to leave space on the south side for future development that never came to pass.

In the middle of the hotel lobby, between the lounge and reception/shop, and facing a giant wall map of the locality by mapmaker Sean O’Shea, was another odd attraction: an enclosed glass cistern/rock garden that drained rain water from the roof and poured it down the interior walls onto the pebbles below. It was brilliant for a hotel resort in that it relied on typical lousy Irish weather to work effectively. Finally there was the “Public” Bar, a room aside the delivery area about the size and shape of a railway car. It looked like an extension of the men’s toilet, with the same tile décor. Seriously, I think they built a public restroom and then decided to add an opening to the bar counter. Understand; hotels then were not as open to the general public as they are today. The understanding at the time was that only residents would use the “high” bar with the plush seats, while the pub was for any locals who happened to be passing by. The customers in each would not mix with each other, it was assumed. They would only stare across the social divide, directly facing each other through the half-doors from their respective counter spaces. It never actually worked out this way. Economics forced plans to change.

When the hotel opened its doors in 1972, it was no longer owned by Billy Huggard. Despite his decade of plans, expenses grew and the economy nose-dived. The hotel was bought by entrepreneur Jack Mulcahy who the same year opened the renovated Waterville Lake Hotel and the expanded Waterville Golf Links. His partner in the hotel was Gaeltarra Éireann (the predecessor of Udarás). Their intention was to create a chain of hotels exclusive to the Gaeltacht in order to increase tourism to those areas. One effect of their involvement was the insistence on naming the resort Óstán Rinn Rua in most tourist literature, which cannot have helped with the marketing.

From day one, the hotel was inclusive. The bar and restaurant were open to all. The hotel would not have lasted otherwise, especially miles away from any population center. For many locals, especially older ones, the hotel was a godsend. It was a new, clean, comfortable destination for many nights in the seventies and eighties that they would otherwise have spent alone at home. The bar was roomy and uncrowded, the entertainment was good (and free), and they were guaranteed to meet somebody they knew. It was the social center of the neighborhood for years. Everybody was eventually going to end up there at some point, and they never hurried you out at midnight. For several years Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann sponsored an Irish music show, the Seisúin, at these Gaeltacht hotels. At the Reenroe Hotel, the audience each week was entirely comprised of locals. They were often the same ones each week. It would be no exaggeration to say that the hotel extended the lives of more than a few in the nearby countryside.

Mulcahy worked to give the resort a luxurious veneer that would match his other Waterville enterprises. He constructed an asphalt airstrip alongside the beach below the hotel in hopes of literally luring the jet-set to the neighborhood. Many came to enjoy the acclaimed new golf course. But the Reenroe Hotel did not share its fortune. The airstrip could only accommodate the smallest aircraft. Furthermore, it may have been self-defeating. Anybody wealthy enough to fly a private plane down to Waterville for an afternoon of golf could fly back to Dublin in the evening without having to spend the night in a Kerry hotel. After five years, the hotel could no longer maintain its luxury resort ambitions and was put up for sale.

For one year the hotel was operated by local hoteliers the Main family, while the restaurant was independently run by Chef Raymond Hunt. Then in 1978 the hotel was purchased by a consortium of owners, one of whom was Sean Cluskey, who served as manager for the next eight years, a period which saw the hotel’s greatest success. First, they changed the name of the resort to the Waterville Beach Hotel, to the objections of some locals and any who cared about geographical accuracy. But at least the name was now listed in the hotel guides in recognizable English. A swimming pool was installed a year later. It was only slightly larger than their snooker table, but it was welcome in the miserable summer of 1980, and many of the local children first learned to swim in it. The cistern, which had cracked and threatened to flood the lobby, was replaced with a miniature greenhouse. Finally, the bar was renovated. A new entrance was built, more deliberately opening it up to the public, and a dance floor was installed in the center.

Entertainers were hired to perform every night; local musicians such as Paddy and Rose Fogarty from Waterville or the O’Shea Bros. from Caherciveen. The Waterville Beach Hotel was clearly marketing itself exclusively to families at this point. Its guests were families from Dublin, Cork and London looking for seaside drinking holidays in some remote country spot where their kids couldn’t wander off too far and get into trouble. One musician, Declan O’Keefe, performed early evening shows of songs and games every night for younger children, presumably to tire the youngsters out and give their parents some free time.

I frequently spent hours at the hotel during this period, swimming in the pool, playing video games and drinking orange squash in the bar. I often wondered in the following years why I was allowed to loiter around the place. Sean Cluskey and the staff had a remarkably flexible attitude towards youngsters hanging around. In retrospect, I suspect they tolerated local youths to a certain level because they were a distraction and company for the children of the residents. Maybe we should have been put on retainer?

All good runs come to an end though. In 1986, the hotel was sold again, this time to the Healy family of Tralee. They put almost all of the hotel business into the bar trade. They doubled the size of the bar by expanding it into the games rooms. Big names from further afield were hired to play the room too. The Furey Brothers and Davey Arthur appeared. Billy Bullman, a showman from Cork, was a regular headliner. Weekly Kerry Set competitions were also held, now that they had a room big enough to accommodate them. But the hotel business suffered. This was partly because of the late night concerts and discos every evening. But the hotel trade was failing all over the country. Hotels in the large towns and cities prospered because they could always rely on passing trade. But visitors to the country preferred B&Bs and rentals. The bar trade fell too over the late 1980s. Who is going to come to the late night disco when all the young people have left for New York and Boston?

In the meantime, Sean Cluskey moved to Dingle to manage the Skellig Hotel, which he soon converted into a twin of the Waterville Beach. Anytime I visited the Skellig in the 1990s, the interior rock garden, the angling-themed bar décor, and the jumbo chess and checkers sets always gave me a sense of deja-vu.

The Waterville Beach Hotel shut its doors in the autumn of 1989. Over the quarter century since then, rumors have popped up every few years of grand new plans for the site. One year I would hear that it was to become a housing development, the next I would hear a luxury health spa. But each plan has dissolved as the old hotel has continued to crumble and the headland itself erodes into the bay. Renovating the building became quickly impractical after the first few years of abandonment. Now any new owners would have the added expense of destroying the old building. I know it’s an absolute mess, but I confess I would miss seeing its blockish profile atop the cliffs from across Reenroe Strand.