Bill Kelly

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The husks of zombie hotels that litter Ireland today serve to underline not just the folly of Charlie McCreevy's boom-to-bust economics, but also to tell a more permanent truth. Hotel keeping is not a profession, not even an art form. It is both those things, of course, but it is even more: to keep an hotel is a vocation. And in that church of hotel keeping, Bill Kelly is the Grand Vizar.

To tell what Kelly's Resort Hotel means, to say what it represents, we need to tell a simple anecdote. It is many years ago, now, and we are in one of the utility rooms making a bottle for one of the babies. A teenager is washing some sports gear. “Your first visit to Kelly's?” we ask, as you do. “Well, actually, it's my sixteenth visit”, replies the sixteen years old Northerner. And you realise that Kelly's is not just an hotel: it is part of his life. Part of so many lives.

Bill Kelly has been running the hotel created by his family since 1986. He has made a formidable creation even better, year on year, faithful to his calling, endlessly self-critical, always self-deprecating. His secret is to understand that Kelly's is two families. There is the family that is the staff who run the hotel, wedded not just to their jobs but also, frequently, to each other. And then there is the family that Kelly's represents to its guests, for whom the hotel is like an ideal family, the perfect relatives whom one can visit each year, and whose house gives endless, fascinating pleasure, because they cook so well, have such a fine cellar, and such meticulous taste in art. You linger in the public spaces of Kelly's as if in an ideal world, a place run by an enlightened dynasty, with a devotion to public service. There is nowhere else like it, anywhere in the world.

Kelly's Resort Hotel, Rosslare, County Wexford
053 913 2114
www.kellys.ie