Born: 18 November 1952, United Kingdom
Died: 14 December 2016
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: NA
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Terry Clavin. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Bowler, Gillian (1952–2016), businessperson, was born on 18 November 1952 in Lewisham Hospital, London, the younger daughter of Maurice Bowler, a printers’ estimator of Ennersdale Road, Lewisham, and his wife Joesphine (née Tayler). Her maternal grandfather (Edward) Easton Tayler had been a society painter, and her father exposed her to art, poetry, literature and philosophy. A good student who captained her school’s hockey and netball teams, she grew up in London until her family moved c. 1964 to Cowes on the Isle of Wight. She nearly died, aged thirteen, upon contracting a rare variant of nephritis, a kidney disease, which hospitalised her for two years. Seeing no point in returning to school, she obtained a secretarial qualification before working briefly as a personal assistant for Cowes’ town clerk.
Selling the sun
Boredom drove her, aged sixteen, to London where she joined Greek Island Holidays, a small, fast-growing package holiday concern. She was soon making sales and visiting Greece to arrange accommodation and research holiday brochures. After opening branch offices in Manchester (summer 1972) and Dublin (early 1973), she quit her job to write travel brochures and trade aeroplane tickets from her London flat. During a research trip to Greece, she ran into, and promptly fell for, Harry Sydner, an Irish travel agent who she had first met during her earlier stint in Dublin; she followed him back to Dublin in autumn 1973. He had separated from his wife, with whom he had a daughter, and the prevailing moral climate meant that Sydner and Bowler were for many years coy about their relationship. They bought a mews dwelling in Morehampton Lane, Donnybrook, c. 1975, before eventually marrying in a London registry office in 1989.
Bowler worked for various Dublin travel companies, but they were averse to allowing women responsibility so in March 1975 she founded Budget Travel, paying the £12 monthly rent for her one-room basement office in arrears. Budget Travel was at 103 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin; Sydner’s company, Travel Places, traded from 144 Lower Baggot Street. Greece was then a destination overlooked by Irish tour operators (i.e., developers of package holidays); Bowler’s love for and knowledge of Greece was such that she found herself persuading callers of its attractions and tailoring suitable holidays. Her business grew through word of mouth and within three years she had become a tour operator.
In 1976 she produced an austerely illustrated, four-page Greek holiday brochure which, unusually, was crammed with useful information and forthright about the sometimes-Spartan accommodation. She lured the young, chic, and adventurous with her cheap ‘wanderer’ packages, entailing flights on elderly turboprop aircraft followed by stays in a motley assortment of hostels, tavernas, village houses and pensions for two weeks of island-hopping. Budget Travel thrived as young Irish holiday-goers began flocking to Greece in the late 1970s. She had time for establishing a restaurant with Sydner on Grafton Street – named Wings, it folded in 1977 – and for co-founding Inside Ireland, a magazine aimed at Irish-Americans, acting as its joint editor from 1978 to 1984.
As the Irish Travel Agents Association (ITAA) by-laws favoured the established players, she remained a non-member, which precluded most travel agents from selling holidays for her, though some did so covertly. Instead, she sold direct, benefiting from not having to pay travel agents’ commissions while also delivering cheaper holidays by counting on having relatively few empty seats on her chartered flights. If her youth and gender blinded competitors to the danger her business nous represented, it also stopped Aer Lingus from taking her seriously, and it was not until 1979 that the national carrier put on flights for her. In 1981, however, amid widespread concerns about shoddy business practices within the travel trade, she cemented Budget Travel’s growing reputation for reliability by making it the first Irish travel company to underpin its operations with an insurance bond.
Bowler rented 46 Lower Baggot Street in 1978, then moved on to bigger offices again by buying 140 Lower Baggot Street in 1982. Her brochures, which featured colour photography from 1981, became increasingly voluminous, detailed and visually appealing, if not to say racy (by Irish standards). Budget Travel’s range of destinations expanded during the early 1980s to include the south of France, Corsica, Ibiza and the Canary Islands, the Costa del Sol and Majorca, and later Portugal, Cyprus and Turkey. Bowler diversified into everything from budget accommodation to five-star hotels while switching mainly to single-location holidays but with an abiding stress on the higher-margin, young singles demographic. She joined the ITAA in November 1982, having reached the limits of what was achievable with direct selling.
Sydner became joint managing director alongside Bowler in 1982, and if their unsparing frankness towards each other sometimes disconcerted their staff, it made for a formidable business partnership. She focused on pricing, flight contracts and client relations; he on accommodation, producing Budget’s growing range of brochures and presenting a more hard-nosed front. Both were sharp, plain-spoken operators, noted for their diligence and for haggling interminably. Prioritising flexibility and offering a personal service, Bowler was slow to introduce computers and occasionally either manned the switchboard or stood behind the counter. Her overwhelmingly female staff enjoyed the irreverent, collegial atmosphere.
Cultivating a public profile
Exploiting her novelty as a prominent woman in business, Bowler developed an outsized public profile from 1980, with the lavish annual launch of Budget Travel’s holiday programme attracting the national newspapers’ social diarists and an array of RTÉ broadcasters. She played along when journalists asked about her favourite clothes, recipes, makeup and holidays, harvesting continuous free publicity. Always photographed with sunglasses perched on her head, she projected an aura of style, sophistication and fun that enthralled women, who, in practice, decided most Irish holiday purchases. Her occasional extravagance was exemplified by a taste for flashy sports cars, long lunches and fashionable parties. This zest for life derived from her youthful near-death experience, as did her strong social conscience: she was known for spontaneous acts of generosity and was active in charities from the 1980s.
Initially, Bowler was dismissive of feminism, asserting that she benefited from being a woman, and only in later life spoke of the sexism she encountered within a travel trade that was largely composed of hard-bitten, middle-aged men. Jealous of her media coverage, Joe Walsh, the dominant Irish tour operator, verbally abused Bowler and widely predicted that her business would go under. Walsh knew how damaging such talk could be as, like many other growing but undercapitalised tour operators, Bowler needed unruffled creditors if Budget Travel was to weather the long interval between receiving deposits on holidays and gathering sales receipts. Moreover, she was under pressure from her bank throughout the early-to-mid-1980s after expanding rapidly. Behind the assured public persona, Bowler worked long hours keeping her business afloat.
The originally small garden at Bowler and Sydner’s Morehampton Lane mews was expanded through the purchase of five adjacent plots by 1988, developing into a cornucopia of exotic trees and plants. The house, extended four times in the 1990s, was filled with modern Irish art, which Bowler bought compulsively from the late 1970s. Her obsession was such that she raised the living room ceiling to accommodate a large painting and latterly stashed artworks behind sofas, under beds and in sheds. She went through a phase of acquiring older Irish artists like Jack Yeats but preferred contemporary Irish artists such as Barrie Cooke, Louis Le Brocquy, Patrick Collins and Basil Blackshaw, with the English artist Albert Irvin her great favourite; female nudes featured prominently in her collection. In 1988 she joined the board of the Douglas Hyde Gallery. Further to having a good eye for art, she devoured literary fiction, political biographies and poetry.
The travel trade suffered from weak demand throughout Ireland’s recessionary 1980s, further pressurised by incursions from British travel giants and state-funded competition from Aer Lingus-owned tour operators. Bowler survived by adroitly estimating demand, mostly avoiding the common errors of chasing sales or of being greedy on price. When it came to launching her annual programme, she forfeited potential early sales by allowing her rivals to show their hand first before undercutting them. The emphasis was on delivering value and service; accordingly, she chartered flights that left at the weekend in daylight rather than midweek at night-time. She was always tinkering with fresh ideas, developing an invaluable off-peak sideline from the mid-1980s in arranging school tours abroad, yet she advanced warily into new areas and swiftly abandoned lossmaking initiatives. Budget Travel excelled in certain niches while developing a broad market presence.
A canny sale and burgeoning state sector career
In August 1987, with Budget Travel positioned as Ireland’s third-largest tour operator with a staff of thirty and yearly sales of 35,000 holidays, she sold the business to the British conglomerate Granada for £4.48 million (some of this payable after an earnout) and a lucrative three-year contract for herself and Sydner as managing directors. Many believed the price was generous, but Granada identified Budget Travel as the Irish tour operator with the best management, staff, profit margins and prospects. She stole a march on her rivals by recognising early that Irish travel companies – who had to contend with much larger north-European concerns in bidding for accommodation – needed British backing if they were to meet their customers’ growing expectations, and she used Granada’s financial clout to extract improved terms from paying cash up-front and block-booking accommodation long-term. Granada was so happy with the subsequent progress that it gave Bowler and Sydner a free hand and repeatedly renewed their contracts, ultimately rewarding them with a joint ten per cent share in Budget Travel.
Freed by the buyout from having to scramble for Budget Travel’s funding, which had taken up much of her time, she accumulated appointments to public boards and committees while also sitting on the boards of companies within the Granada conglomerate. Although the Fine Gael–Labour government had appointed her to the Irish Goods Council from 1982 to 1985, her state sector career really took off in February 1988 when Taoiseach Charles Haughey made her chair of a taskforce that was given a month to devise proposals for reviving the Irish tourist industry. She threw herself into this role, showing herself to be accomplished at chairing meetings. Haughey was impressed by the ensuing report, calling an emergency cabinet meeting the next day to approve its recommendations.
Aligning herself with Fianna Fáil, she joined Haughey’s social circle, abetted by her longstanding friendship with his mistress Terry Keane, who was one of the two witnesses at Bowler’s wedding. Haughey and Keane were semi-regular dinner guests in Bowler’s house, and they, likewise, hosted her and Sydner in Haughey’s Inishvickillane island retreat and in his favourite Dublin restaurant, Le Coq Hardi. Her closeness to Haughey inspired a certain amount of snide commentary, with one business publication headlining her as ‘Charlie’s angel’. (Bowler would laud Haughey even after the exposure of his corruption in 1997, visiting him right up to his death.)
In 1988 Haughey appointed her to the Independent Radio and Television Commission (IRTC), where she spent the next decade assisting deliberations over the issuing of broadcast licences to independent radio and television companies, and as chair of the Dublin Area Heritage Development Group, which considered schemes for reviving inner-city Dublin’s Liberties and Temple Bar areas. Arising from this she was a director (from 1991) of the two state development companies established to transform Temple Bar into a cultural quarter. Temple Bar was one of Haughey’s pet projects, and in November 1989 she became chair of another, the embryonic Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham. She ensured that IMMA – inadequately financed and derided as Haughey’s folly – opened its doors in 1991. Remaining chair until 1997, she defended IMMA’s emphasis on showing challenging rather than crowd-pleasing art, most notably the collaborative exhibitions with inner-city communities that addressed social deprivation and domestic violence.
Ireland’s sun queen
As the shakeout within the Irish travel trade intensified, Joe Walsh Tours retreated upmarket in the late 1980s while Aer Lingus exited the business altogether in 1990. Budget Travel continued to go from strength to strength, moving to bigger offices at 134–135 Lower Baggot Street in 1988 and expanding into chartering flights from Cork (1990) and Shannon (1991). The diversification into long-haul holidays arose in response to the prospect of a disastrous 1991 in the eastern Mediterranean due to the Gulf War. That year the Russian carrier, Aeroflot, agreed to pick up Bowler’s customers in Shannon, where its aircraft refuelled en route for Miami. Aeroflot saw no need for inflight meals or entertainment on its uncomfortable single-aisle aircraft, and she regularly found herself having to resolve operational mishaps at Shannon. Regardless, Aeroflot’s low fuel costs allowed her to tout unbeatably cheap Florida holidays and the route was an immediate success, breaking open the transatlantic market for middle-income Irish sun seekers. Miami developed into a stop-off for Budget Travel holidays to Mexico and a growing number of Caribbean destinations from the mid-1990s.
Bowler initiated a poster advertising campaign in 1991 displaying a rear-view of a woman in a thong. Featured on bus shelters across Dublin, the image came to national attention on 9 February when the Irish Times featured a photograph that contrasted the poster’s sun-kissed setting with the snowy Irish weather. About fifty complaints reached the Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland (ASAI), which advised Budget Travel to remove or modify the image. The attendant media coverage gained renewed impetus when Bowler complied with the ASAI request by having each offending posterior covered with a sticker declaring ‘Don’t get left behind’. For years afterwards, newspapers took every opportunity to reprint the poster.
During the Irish travel trade’s ensuing decade of roaring growth, surging sales saw Budget Travel emerge as the dominant tour operator with one third of the market and yearly profits of over £4 million from selling around 135,000 holidays. Trading increasingly as a low-price, high-volume business, Budget Travel carved up the mass market with Falcon Holidays, notwithstanding their contrived, publicity-driven price wars. In January 1993 she inaugurated the Budget Travel New Year’s sale whereby those seeking free or discounted holidays queued along Lower Baggot Street, first for hours, then overnight and eventually for days, making for ideal media fodder. When other tour operators began forming alliances with travel agents, she responded by developing a nationwide retail chain for Budget Travel from 1994, ruffling feathers by, in the main, establishing new shops and poaching staff rather than buying out existing operations.
The boardroom circuit
Granada, however, was withdrawing from the travel business, which in early 1996 encouraged the UK’s leading travel firm, Thomson Holidays, to blitz the Irish market, specifically targeting Budget Travel. Bowler refused to give ground in what became a financially debilitating struggle. Having knocked £10 million–£15 million off the acquisition price, Thomson Holidays bought Budget Travel that August for £12.3 million (excluding the £8 million cash reserves), with Bowler and Sydner receiving £3 million for their shares and existing contracts, along with new contracts as joint managing directors. By then the company almost ran itself and Bowler was becoming restless. In her final years there, Budget Travel tightened its grip on a flourishing Irish market, boasting a 300-strong workforce spanning thirty outlets. Bowler and Sydner resigned as managing directors at the end of 1999, serving instead as joint non-executive chairs until 2007.
This allowed more time for enjoying their country retreat, bought in 1988, at Courtown, near Gorey, Co. Wexford, where she took in abused donkeys while Sydner, a light aviation enthusiast, turned the attached acres into a landing strip. A longstanding player in the stock and foreign currency markets, she also invested, along with Sydner, in startup companies, including a loss-making bowling alley company in 1989 and an online hotel reservation startup in the late 1990s. As her kidney problems had returned in the early 1990s, necessitating periodic dialysis treatments, she settled into a ‘high-powered semi-retirement’ (Sunday Times, 30 May 2004); Budget Travel’s success had allowed her to step back from the limelight in the 1990s and develop a formidable non-executive business career.
During the 1990s and 2000s she sat on the boards of Tedcastle, Irish Life, the Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business, the Irish Cancer Society, and various Granada group companies, amongst others, and she was a long-serving director of the Grafton Group (1995–2011). As president of the Institute of Directors (2000–02), she increased its involvement in charitable activities and established Ireland’s first centre for corporate governance under its auspices in 2002, becoming chair of the centre’s executive committee. Injecting a note of diversity (merely by virtue of her gender) and nonconformity into otherwise monochrome boardrooms, she was much appreciated by her fellow directors for bringing acumen, practicality and a light conversational touch to bear on proceedings. Her political connections surely helped too, with Fianna Fáil governments appointing her to the board of Voluntary Health Insurance (VHI, 2001–11), taskforces relating to Shannon Airport (1993) and sport (2006), a strategic review group for the tourism sector (2002), and a forum for examining the future of public service broadcasting (2002). From 2003, she served a five-year term chairing the newly established tourist development authority, Fáilte Ireland, providing strong leadership for an ambitious, well-funded executive.
Irish Life and Permanent and the crash
After six years as a director, in 2004 she became non-executive chair (though she always insisted on being addressed as a ‘chairman’) of Ireland’s leading life assurance and residential mortgage provider, Irish Life and Permanent (IL&P). The previous incumbent had resigned over a tax scandal so Bowler’s appointment as the first woman chair of an Irish financial institution provided a timely publicity boost, while her customer-friendly profile accorded with IL&P’s attempts to shake off its staid image. The suspicion remained that IL&P’s chief executive David Went did not want a financial sector heavyweight overseeing him. Apart from driving the expansion of IL&P’s corporate responsibility programme, which included investments in community projects, she took her cues from the management. Her yearly salary rose from €240,000 in 2005 to €320,000 by 2007.
IL&P’s share of the residential mortgage market had slipped alarmingly in early 2005 as intense competition between the banks, amid a runaway property boom, undermined lending standards. Keen to scotch the takeover rumours arising from IL&P’s becalmed share price, she enthusiastically endorsed aggressive countermeasures that included providing 100 per cent mortgages worth five times the applicant’s annual salary (rather than the customary two-and-a-half times); lending into the buy-to-let sector in the UK, increasingly on an interest-only basis; and offering tracker mortgages, where interest payments were pegged to the European Central Bank (ECB) rate. Between January 2004 and December 2007, IL&P’s loan book ballooned from €17 billion to €40 billion, far outstripping its €14 billion deposit base.
This loans-to-deposit chasm, easily the largest of any Irish bank, was bridged with debt, much of it short-term, borrowed cheaply on the international money markets – that is, until this source of credit evaporated from mid-2007. As IL&P became increasingly reliant on the emergency liquidity funding provided by the ECB, Bowler and her chief executive, Denis Casey, met regularly with the Irish financial regulators, who in June 2008 privately discussed having her replaced by someone with greater banking experience. After the international financial system seized up that September, IL&P burned through assets that the ECB could accept as collateral and was days away from going under when the Irish government acceded to pleas from Bowler (amongst others) by, on 30 September, announcing its guarantee of the debts of Ireland’s six main banks. Regardless, that November, Bowler and Casey infuriated the minister for finance, Brian Lenihan, by resisting his plan for consolidating Ireland’s stricken banking system around Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Banks; they announced that IL&P was seeking to take over the EBS mutual society.
In February 2009 it emerged that IL&P had facilitated (in September 2008) a back-to-back €7.45 billion short-term loan, which enabled the failing Anglo-Irish Bank (‘Anglo’) to exaggerate its customer deposits by fourteen per cent in its published year-end financial statements. IL&P made a similarly artificial €750 million deposit with Anglo for its half-yearly results in March 2008, while Anglo had reciprocated for IL&P’s half-yearly results in June by agreeing to a circular €3.3 billion interbank deposit for the purposes of disguising IL&P’s dependence on the ECB. Although Bowler knew that the two banks were assisting each other, per the Financial Regulator’s strategy of urging mutual liquidity support, detailed knowledge of the especially dubious March 2008 and September 2008 transactions – where IL&P had abetted Anglo’s deception by funnelling the money through its non-banking subsidiary to make it look like a customer deposit – had been confined to a handful of senior executives. Casey briefed her on the loans in January 2009 at the earliest.
Summoning Bowler and Casey into his office on 12 February, Lenihan intimated that he wanted the resignations of those responsible; he spoke privately with Bowler and clearly expected her to deliver Casey’s head. But a defiant Casey pointed out that some sense of the transactions had been communicated in advance to the state regulators. The IL&P board went into an eight-hour conclave, during which the Anglo chair Donal O’Connor seemingly rang Bowler, urging her to support an intended Anglo statement that would implicate the regulators. She emerged with the resignations of the finance director and the treasury chief along with a statement that merely noted the authorities’ encouragement of mutual aid; Anglo’s subsequent statement was similarly circumspect. Casey’s reprieve occurred over the objections of the two government-appointed directors, and he resigned the next day once it became clear that Lenihan was unappeased.
Combined with the statement’s qualified apology, Casey’s botched removal confirmed the general impression of an arrogant, criminally incompetent banking elite, making Bowler a focus for public anger: she received death threats and an elderly woman berated and jostled her in a shop. The experience of those weeks scarred her psychologically, even if she acknowledged later ‘it was my job to take the blame’ (Image, Nov. 2010). Casey was not replaced until June, and Bowler worked long hours in the interim, despite being in poor health, often sleeping in her office. She cut an uncertain figure during a media appearance on 5 March 2009 wherein she apologised unreservedly for the Anglo loan scandal, repudiating the off-the-record insinuations of official collusion that had emanated from IL&P. (Casey was convicted for fraud in 2016 in relation to these transactions.)
There was a return to form for the IL&P AGM in May, where Bowler disarmed the shareholders by mingling with them beforehand, and in her subsequent media assignations, where she eschewed the dismissive tone adopted by her banking peers. Crucially, IL&P was the only major bank not to require a state capital injection in 2009, mainly because its loan book was composed overwhelmingly of residential mortgages, which do not sour as drastically and as immediately as the property development loans that weighed down its competitors; whereas these banks had all purged their chairs and senior executives by mid-2009, her position was under no immediate threat.
Yet Bowler presided over an entity that needed continuous and extensive ECB liquidity support as it faced a wave of non-performing mortgages while being dragged under by an excess of inherently unprofitable tracker loans. The published accounts under-provided for bad debts by an order of magnitude, but if the Irish government turned a blind eye, corporate depositors and wholesale lenders did not, causing IL&P’s funding position to deteriorate from May 2010. She announced her resignation as the Irish sovereign debt bailout loomed that December, staying on until April 2011; by then an ECB-enforced inspection of the bank’s books had exposed a €4 billion capital shortfall; the state ended up owning 99.2 per cent of IL&P’s banking arm, wiping out the 100,000 shareholders. Bowler’s 30,000 shares had cost her about €400,000, though she had received some €2 million in pay from IL&P since 1998. (In 2008 she had accepted a salary of €288,000 per annum instead of the intended €425,000; this was further reduced to €200,000 from 2009.)
Assessment and death
This unhappy finale tarnished a stellar career that saw Bowler play a prominent role in trends such as the subversion of cartel-like business practices, the transformation of the sun holiday from a luxury into a consumer staple, the introduction of private sector expertise (and interests) into the state sector, and freer attitudes towards female sexuality. Above all, she was an outstanding, almost singular, role model for women entrepreneurs. Following years of worsening health, she died in the Blackrock Clinic, Co. Dublin, on 14 December 2016, after which her remains were brought to Mount Jerome crematorium, Harold’s Cross, Dublin. Her will disposed of an estate worth €3.9 million. In 2017 fifty paintings in her collection were auctioned for a total of €400,000.