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‘From London to Cape Town, from Monte Carlo to Marbella, the Irish have been spending their new fortunes with an alacrity that would have made their forefathers blush,” a fella by the name of Alan Ruddock wrote in the Observer, July 2001. “Eight years of a remarkable economic boom have transformed Ireland. Its people are young and wealthy and have shed the traditional inhibition to flaunt their wealth…” Seven years later, with the Celtic Tiger in its death throes, the Irish in Marbella are still not averse to flaunting their wealth, albeit a little less conspicuously than when the boom was in full swing. They come here to this bastion of excess glamour and kitsch as much to escape the rain and biting winds of Ireland as they do the talk of economic depression. (One well-known Irish businessman who didn’t want to be named said that any foreign investor watching George Lee on RTE would think Ireland was a third-world country. ) They wear their botox and their surgery with arrested ageing pride as they spray the contents of bottles of Dom Perignon at Nikki Beach. They still tuck into piles of lobster at the best fish restaurants in southern Spain. Still, having been to Marbella many times over the years, I have noticed that the place is definitely quieter than in previous years. The ostentation is not ratcheted up to as high a gear as before. There are many Irish couples in Marbella — Patrick and Annette Rocca, Bernie and Lorenzo Caffola, David and Beverly Marshall, Louis Murray and partner Cristina to name but a few — who spend their summers here and would never venture into the kitsch Eurotrash environs of Puerto Banus. “We love chilling out with the kids on Victor’s Beach and enjoying the quiet life with our kids,” Annette Rocca told me. “But yes, the reality is things are quieter here too,” she added, “especially in restaurants. You must have noticed that? Everyone is being careful.” “It is less busy than it was,” Bernie Caffola told me. “The economic downturn has affected here. Look at the amount of boats for sale in Marbella marina.” “But the quality of life here and the constant sunshine makes life in Marbella just so wonderful,” added Bernie. “It is great to get away from the doom and gloom. We love being out here on holidays. We love the quiet life of going to lunch in the Marbella Club with friends, and dinner in Da Brunos,” Beverly Marshall, wife of Irish hairdressing legend David, told me. Valerie Roe and her husband Dennis, here for a month, celebrate their son Josh’s seventh birthday with a party on Sunny Beach tomorrow. “The recession has hit here badly too,” she told me. “But you can live cheaply; I brought 11 people out for lunch yesterday and the bill was €110. Put that together with the weather and I’d rather be here than walking down Grafton Street in the rain.” The 300 days of sunshine a year is surely an antidote to the recessionary rhetoric. “I don’t known about it being an antidote,” laughed Cristina Petrar. “It is more like pure unadulterated escapism. Bury one’s head in the sand — almost literally — on Victor’s Beach,” she said, referring to that little bit of sand down from the Puente Romano hotel that has become a second home to the beau monde. Last night, Cristina and her partner Louis Murray flew home for the christening beano of Zacharie Louis Alan (the first child of Louis’s daughter Sara and husband Mark Swan) at their mansion in the Killiney hills beside Bono and Ali. Murray, suave owner of lLa Stampa on Dawson Street, and Cristina, are regulars at Da Bruno, Toni Dalli’s, Salduba, Da Paolo and Villa Tiberius, as are many others of the Irish set in Marbella — people like Eddie Jordan, John Magnier, Norma Smurfit, Valerie Roe, Annette Rocca, Jenny Buckley and Jean McClean. This exalted crowd tend to prefer the laidback calm of Orange Square in Marbella town to the nouveau riche vulgarity of Puerto Banus. Eddie Jordan was on the golf course at the Marbella Club on Thursday, as was David Marshall. John Magnier was dining with family and friends in the Lone Star brasserie in Puerto Banus on Monday night. Irish fashion designer Virginia Macari was in Sinatra’s in the port on Monday night with Theresa Rocca. On Wednesday afternoon, after a game of tennis with Alan Sugar at the exclusive Puerto Romano tennis club, Patrick Rocca took his wife Annette and two sons Stuart and Patrick junior to a long lunch at the super-chic Hotel Villa Padierna in the mountains above Marbella. “On a clear day you can see the coastline of Africa,” Annette told me. “The pace of life here is so relaxed that it has mood-altering qualities. In Dublin, everyone seems panicked by the so-called recession, but in Marbella everything can always wait until ‘manana’,” Jenny Buckley of Channel 6 told me. There were sore Irish heads last Sunday and Monday with the bon vivants — Jenny Buckley among them — still recovering from the Fiat-sponsored Water Angels Charity Ball on Saturday night at Finca De Conception in Istan. (Norma’s Marbella Ball in 2005, her last in southern Spain, was a bit of a damp squib and Mark and Lynn Quinlan started their Water Angels Ball instead.) “For as long as can be remembered, the Costa del Sol has been a playground for the Irish. Towns like Torremolinos and Fuengirola have always been a favourite with the Irish masses,” the ball’s MC Maurice Boland, who has lived here for 25 years, told me, “but it’s the fashionable Marbella where the Irish rich really like to play. “Marbella could be described as a mini Foxrock where the Fannies can be found in abundance.” r9 712 mb r11s This article is from http://www.britishgolfclub.com/ More british golf club at http://www.britishgolfclub.com/
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