Patsy O’Kane is one of the great hoteliers.
Back in 2008, an hotel guest, who just happened to be celebrating their wedding with a reception at the hotel, wrote that “It was as if a member of Patsy's own family was getting married”.
That's the sign of the great hoteliers. They make you family.
Ms O'Kane is one of the most important figures in Northern Ireland’s culture of hospitality, and she has been one of those figures through the miserable dog days of the North's recent history, when opening the doors of an hotel in Northern Ireland, day after day, was an heroic act. But then, coping with the attrition of terrorism wouldn't be a problem to a house that was, from 1942 to 1945, actually occupied by U.S. Marines. 500 of them. For the African-Americans in the corp, it was the first time that they were treated by locals as equal to white Marines: Derry treated them like family.
Since opening the hotel in 1991, Ms O’Kane and her team have incarnated that hospitality which the people of Northern Ireland have in their DNA, that welcome that so astonished the African-American Marines, and she frames it within the rigor of relentless professionalism, and launches it within the lovely aesthetic of the Beech Hill House itself, day after day.
Patsy O’Kane is to Northern hospitality what Myrtle Allen is to Southern hospitality: an original, a person of true conviction, a shining, modest star. What makes her work in the Beech Hill special is simple, yet utterly fundamental: everyone in the hotel over-delivers, everyone in the crew is always trying to do their best, to make sure that every detail is done right, and done as well as it can be. That is the art of hotel keeping, that is the very essence of the art, and Ms O’Kane is mistress of that art and practices that art every day in her work in this beautiful, early 18th-century house. Give this woman a peerage: Dame Patsy sounds good to us.