*TikTok influencer Eoin Reardon has been let go from Bunratty.
CUTBACKS have been introduced in Bunratty Castle & Folk Park.
Clare County Council is introducing measures to scale back on spending at Bunratty Castle & Folk Park.
Bunratty has yet to meet financial expectations since it came under the ownership of the local authority in May 2023.
Clare County Council’s annual financial statement for 2024 stated, “Out turn from our tourism sites has not been as favourable as that adopted in Budget 2025 or as forecast into 2025”. It continued, “While Clare tourism sites in the west of the county have performed broadly in line with expectations, the Shannon Heritage sites have not performed as expected, returning significant losses compared to that forecast. This result is the subject of an internal review to identify the background to this and to realign business plans and spending to return the sites to at least a balanced position”.
In an in-depth interview with The Clare Echo ahead of his December exit as Chief Executive of the Council, Pat Dowling was questioned on his previous description of the Shannon Heritage sites transfer sites as “one of the biggest risks” in the Council’s 125 year plus history.
He said, “The risk is paying off. Every risk has to be calculated, and not taken, carelessly, that acquisition and if I look across at my desk now, there’s a book at the back of it holding up everything, and you see the size of it, it’s about 1000 pages, that’s the due diligence, I’m leaving that to my successor to see what can be done. That was the scale of the due diligence we took out that took a year and a half. That derisked it because it did a full due diligence of what the risks were and how those risks could be mitigated. We’ve done that, we have a new system put in place, we are evolving towards a nuclear tourism company that’ll embrace all the tourism stuff that’s going on”.
Among the cutbacks introduced at Bunratty has been the removal of the jaunting cars and the ending of a contract with TikTok influencers Eoin Reardon and James O’Connor who between them have an online following in excess of three million.
Eoin confirmed that his agreement with Bunratty Castle & Folk Park has ended. “Myself and James were both contracted separately to give them demonstrations in the court yard at Bunratty, I was given traditional woodwork demonstrations and James was given traditional blacksmith demonstrations, although we were two separate contractors it only took a matter of time before the two of us started collaborating together, we had a lot of fun making little projects and videos together. The word all through last summer was that we would be back for summer 2025 and on that understanding we took on a big project together in Christmas for the Castle, it was full on stressful but we were happy to do it in the knowledge that it would help us smoothly transition to the next year with Bunratty. It wasn’t in paper but we had a verbal arrangement with Bunratty that we would be starting our residency from Easter Sunday weekend every weekend through to August”.
He added, “Less than a week before we were due to return, we both got a phonecall saying due to some budgetary constraints they were no longer able to have myself and James working this year. Working in Bunratty was without doubt some of the most fun I’ve had on this content creation journey, I’m really glad to have taken the time to enjoy the journey while I was in it, I knew in the back of my head something might happen and it might not happen again next year, I’m glad I did it, this short notice cancellation means myself and James’ plans for the summer have been completely thrown out the window, I’m sure we will find something but we had a great thing going and it seems a shame to give up on it”.
A spokesperson for Clare County Council told The Clare Echo. “The transition of operations, systems and processes from Shannon Airport Group to Clare County Council coupled with our obligation to comply with public procurement and the Public Spending Code has resulted in the non-engagement of some services for 2025 at Bunratty Castle and Folk Park. The team is diligently working to procure services and products to grow the offering and enhance customer experience aligned to agreed budgets”.
