Despite contributions from seasoned journalists, it is perhaps too soon for a genuinely critical assessment of the businessman Less than a year after his death, Ben Dunne is given a wholly sympathetic documentary. Photo: Gerry Mooney It would be wrong to describe Brian Hayes’s documentary Extraordinary Life: The Ben Dunne Story (RTÉ1, Monday, September 30) as a hagiography. When someone has lived their life as infamously as the late businessman and former chief executive of retail giant Dunnes Stores, who died of a heart attack in Dubai last November, a filmmaker would pull a muscle if they tried to put too much of a positive spin on all of it.
The documentary dutifully chronicles the highs and lows of Dunne’s life and career. There was the spectacular business success in the 1980s when he expanded the Dunnes Stores empire. There was the trauma of his kidnapping by the Provisional IRA in 1981.
A ransom was eventually paid, despite the government’s attempts to thwart it. There was the fall from grace and ousting from the family firm in the 1990s after a meltdown in a Florida hotel room involving cocaine and sex workers. There were the tribunal revelations of financial chicanery and corruption relating to former taoiseach Charles Haughey and minister Michael Lowry.
Finally, there was Dunne’s unlikely business rebirth as the owner of a chain of gyms. It’s not that anything is left out, but the documentary’s failing lies in how little it does with some of it. Despit.