This is something that certain people haven’t wanted to acknowledge about Conor Harris.

Sometimes, he could be a real cunt.

12

When I talk about the boys’ parents, I realize I’m talking about a certain kind of person. The Culhanes and the O’Briens and the Foxes were people who knew people. Or they knew people who knew people. They didn’t quail before the world’s complexity. They knew how to cope. They knew people at The Irish Times and the Evening Herald. They knew people at Deloitte & Touche and they knew people at Microsoft. They knew people at Intel and Lucent Technologies and Independent News and Media. They knew people at Trinity and UCD. They knew barristers and accountants and TDs. They knew people who played golf with the Minister for Justice or the Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht. They knew people at RTÉ. They knew neurosurgeons at Vincent’s and paediatricians at Mater Dei. They knew their local bishop and they had drinks with their local GP. They drank in the Horseshoe Bar of the Shelbourne Hotel or in Doheny & Nesbitt’s, and they ate at Chapter One or Roly’s Bistro. They went antiquing in Dalkey or they went to the Farmers’ Market in Leopardstown. They shopped at Brown Thomas and Habitat and Laura Ashley. All of these superficial things – all of these things about where to shop and where to eat and where to drink – were an aspect of knowing people, of knowing how the world worked, or of thinking you knew how it worked.

Eileen and Brendan Harris were the exceptions to all of this. Eileen Harris, née Houlihan, was born and grew up in County Carlow, on a farm owned and operated by her parents. Brendan Harris grew up in Kilkenny town. They were never a part of the Dublin private-school system. They met each other the morning after a friend’s party. Eileen was eighteen and Brendan was twenty-two. This was in August of 1975. How they made their money was through the restaurant they opened in Dublin in June of 1982. Conor was born two years later, on 20 January 1984. Eileen and Brendan ran the restaurant hands-on for seven years before they paid a manager to take over and began to develop the franchise around Dublin. The restaurants that resulted weren’t particularly upscale but they weren’t particularly downscale, either. The Harrises bought a six-bedroom house in Donnybrook and supervised the running of the four restaurants they owned.

The initial investment for the first restaurant had come from Eileen’s parents. So in a sense the Harrises had money from the start. But they didn’t have money the way Peter Culhane and his wife had money. The Harrises were reluctant to spend their money, and they stayed reluctant for twenty years. They would never build a swimming pool in the back garden, for instance. They were afraid to turn their money into tangible goods. They preferred to keep it liquid.

But they did send their son to Brookfield.