Millionaire businessman, politician, TV show presenter, author - Feargal Quinn was a man of many parts. And in his golden years the senator turned out to be refreshingly right wing

Feargal Quinn has died at the age of 82 after a short illness. The grocery entrepreneur was best known as the founder of the Superquinn supermarket chain and was also a Senator for 23 years, elected to the upper house by graduates of UCD.

Quinn became one of Ireland’s wealthiest men by cashing out at exactly the right time. When you think of Feargal Quinn, you think of a happy chappy. In public he always seemed to be smiling, the perennial housewife’s friend. His infectious enthusiasm was a key factor in his business success and shone through in his TV shows too.

The Quinn world was populated with homespun anecdotes and business fables that he picked up from his own experience in commerce. He enjoyed total recall and part of the charm of Mind Your Own Business, published in 2013, was how he mixed personal vignettes with observations on the shops that featured in his TV series.

Peppered through the book were pearls of Feargal’s business wisdom. However, the big pity is that Quinn didn’t write about what he really thought. To dig that out, you have to delve in the archives of the Senate debates, a place where very few people wander.

In Association with

Hi-Di-Hi

Even at the early stage of building up the Superquinn supermarket chain, Feargal Quinn believed he had more to contribute to Irish society than raising the standards of floor hygiene. He was born in 1936, when to school in Newbridge College and did a commerce degree in UCD. His dad was a grafter and owned the Red Island holiday camp in Skerries, perhaps the origin of Feargal’s hi-di-hi persona.

Quinn opened his first grocery shop in Dundalk in 1960 and added an outlet in Finglas in 1965. When he sold Superquinn to property speculators in 2005, the chain extended to 21 shops. Superquinn’s profitability or otherwise wasn’t revealed publicly, as the supermarkets traded through an unlimited entity. But the asset base was real enough and Quinn and his family reportedly sold the business for c.€450m.

There is a detailed chapter in Mind Your Own Business about passing on the family business to the next generation. At one stage Quinn was determined that he was going follow the lead of the Musgraves and Dunnes and establish a retail dynasty. He changed his mind when Bernard McNamara and others made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Loaded down with huge debt, the Superquinn purchasers tottered into insolvency in 2011, with Musgraves picking up the pieces

Quinn first ran for the Senate in 1973. “An unkind friend said my golf handicap was higher than the number of votes I got,” he recalled. Feargal was sufficiently chastened by this rebuff to lick his wounds until 1993, when he re-entered the political fray, this time successfully.

Quinn must have been doing something right to keep winning a UCD Senate seat. While he was running a mass market retailer Quinn had little option but to steer clear of controversy. He left that shackle behind after selling Superquinn and was prepared to stick his neck out and say things that he considered unpopular.

Minimum Wage

In March 2013, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions weighed into Quinn after he called for the abolition of the minimum wage. ICTU economist Paul Sweeney blasted the suggestion as “misleading, nonsense economics”. According to Sweeney: “Senator Quinn appears to believe that there should be no minimum standards of decency in our society. His claim that the minimum wage acts as some sort of mythical barrier to job creation is utter nonsense and has no basis in economic reality. Cutting wages doesn’t create jobs. It creates poverty and depresses spending in the economy, particularly the retail sector.”

Quinn’s opinion was that the minimum wage, €8.65 per hour at the time, deters firms from taking on staff. “I've always argued that a number of jobs don't exist at certain wages, so we would have far more people working and willing to work if they were able to be paid a lower amount than the minimum amount,” he said. “I would argue that there shouldn't be a minimum wage at all, that people would be willing to work for whatever they could get.”

The senator’s thoughts on the minimum wage would not have been off the cuff. He often gave the impression of being a regular reader of The Economist who comes across little nuggets of information from around the world and clips them for future reference. Perhaps one of the reasons UCD graduates kept returning Quinn to the Oireachtas is that in the confines of Leinster House, where nobody is really listening, he was a spigot of novel ideas.

For instance, Quinn noted in 2012 that the Swedish government had introduced a credit for hiring household help to spur demand for low wage workers. “The combination of lower taxes and fewer benefits in Sweden is encouraging more people to take jobs,” he said. “The Minister for Finance there believes that in the long term Sweden's reforms will raise the country's employment rate by 5%. We seem to forget about this here. We need to get people into any sort of employment.”

On another occasion, Quinn told his Senate colleagues: “Germany deregulated self-employment and cut back unemployment benefit. One may say that sounds like bad news but the intention was to encourage people to work more. Sometimes one must do uncomfortable things or take steps that may not be popular to create jobs.”

In the Budget 2013 debate Quinn observed: “I want to see this country on its feet again, but to do that we will need tough love. How can we sustain the state when the weekly social welfare payment of €188 is more than twice the amount paid in the UK or Germany?

“In Italy and other EU countries people do not receive unemployment benefit if they have not worked. The resources needed to provide a safety net to the less well-off can only be generated through job creation. This point is often forgotten. We have to consider where the money spent on social welfare is being found.”

Quinn believed that the right kind of reform of social welfare can spur growth in the economy. “I cannot understand why it is so difficult to means test benefits. Ireland currently pays the fourth highest rate of child benefit in the European Union. We must run the country as a business and we cannot afford to pay this anymore.”

State Socialism

Grocers tend to be conservative. Ted Heath was nicknamed The Grocer by Private Eye while Mrs Thatcher’s dad owned two grocery shops. Feargal Quinn wasn't cut from the same blue-rinse cloth, though he admitted to being “concerned when I see so many lawyers and teachers but not enough grocers running the state”.

Like Thatcher, Quinn was also impatient with state socialism. When Irish Water was being conceived, Quinn wondered aloud why an offer by Siemens to pay the €800m cost of installing meters in homes had been ignored by government. “I do not understand why we insisted on spending that money and raiding the pension fund instead of accepting the Siemens offer,” Quinn declared.

On another occasion, Quinn was aghast when Bord Pleanála refused planning permission for an artificial ski slope beside Dundalk racecourse because travel to and from the facility would be car dependent.

“I raise the general point that we are an extremely under-populated country,” said the senator. “There are 60 million people in England, which is around the same size as the Republic of Ireland, where the population is 4.5 million. We have much more room for development and given that we are so spread out, the car is the only transport for most of the country.”

In a debate about health insurance, Quinn insisted that the Singapore model makes more sense than the Sláintecare model currently being touted by most politicians. “A key principle of Singapore's national health scheme is that no medical service is provided free of charge, even within the public health care system,” Quinn told his Senate colleagues.

“This mechanism is intended to reduce the over-utilisation of health care services. This is something we experience here. It is a bugbear of many people that medical card holders use their cards unnecessarily for prescriptions and so on. In addition, many people do not want to take up employment out of fear of losing their medical cards. We need to examine this issue because people need to be disincentivised from abusing the system.”

Feargal Quinn’s enduring political legacy is the Construction Contracts Act, which was enacted in 2016. Quinn introduced the original Bill in 2010 as a response to fall-out from the building bust. Among other measures, the law establishes the right to regular payments to sub-contractors over the period of their engagement.

Quinn was also influential in the sector where he came from. His TV sessions with small retailers resulted in genuine improvements for many ailing firms. If small business owners took on board the advice in Mind Your Own Business, they would be in a better place too.

FEARGAL QUINN’S PEARLS OF WISDOM

‘It can be very easy to give in to the temptation of believing that you’re not going to succeed because the marketplace is just not fair out there. The truth is that you can talk yourself into believing just about anything in business, if you really want to. This can be a very seductive and ultimately destructive proposition.’

‘By giving an example to his or her employees, the boss of any business, no matter how big or small, sends out an important message. It is this: ‘This is how I want our company and our employees to behave. See, look to me for your lead’. If a boss is surly or uninterested because he or she is stressed out, this will transmit itself to his or her senior managerial colleagues and right the way down through the organisation.’

‘Targets are critical for any serious business. You have to decide on where you want the business to be for the next twelve months, and then plot that target for every week going forward. By doing this you are taking control of your fate and driving your business. In the absence of such targets, there is a real risk that you will start coasting, meaning you are simply reliant on whether customers spend with you or not. With targets in place you are forced to drive the business, and to drive yourself. You may not always hit these targets, but the very fact they exist helps your business to stay focused on its medium to longer-term goals.’

‘Businesses should never underestimate the impact that the simple act of listening and reacting to their customers' needs can have in a competitive marketplace. Customers and non-customers know more than the management and staff in a business will ever know. Why? Because it is they who make the conscious choice whether to spend their money with that business, or not as the case may be.'

‘Commitment to innovation is hugely important for all businesses and should be placed firmly at the core of everything you do. Staff should also know it is OK to fail once you learn from it and use it as a springboard to your next big idea. For every innovation we got right in Superquinn we got many others wrong. Yet our successes were invariably so worthwhile that our failures were soon forgotten about. In order to keep still in business you have to keep moving forward. If you want things to stay the same, namely the business to continue as a sound, profitable enterprise, then things have to continually change.’

• Quotes from Feargal Quinn’s book, Mind Your Own Business (O’Brien Press)