Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 17:32:00

Few Dublin buildings have lived as many lives under as many names. The Bonnington, on the Swords Road in Drumcondra, began as Broomhill House, an ornate Italianate residence built in 1881 to a design by Albert Murray for Robert Paul, its pediments and pilasters still visible at the heart of the modern complex. The hotel era began when the house was enlarged in 1961-62 by architects Jones and Kelly as the Crofton Airport Hotel, serving the route to Dublin Airport. That incarnation earned its own footnote in Irish music history as a gig room - early U2 shows played there - and as the studio base of pirate broadcaster Alternative Radio Dublin in the super-pirate era. From 1987 the property traded as the Regency Hotel, a north-side landmark for functions, sports dinners and boxing events, run by the McGettigan family alongside their hotels and bars in Ireland and overseas. The Regency name became internationally known for the wrong reason in February 2016, when a fatal shooting at a boxing weigh-in in the hotel escalated the Kinahan-Hutch feud - an event connected to the building only by circumstance, but one that made a rebrand inevitable. In 2017 the McGettigan Group, backed by investors including Dermot Desmond in a 28 million euro programme, renamed the property the Bonnington after its sister hotel in Dubai, refurbishing the lobby, bedrooms and public areas and opening a new McGettigan's bar. Today the four-star operation runs a busy events trade - conferences, banquets, weddings, cabaret and party nights - in function rooms that scale to several hundred guests, with the Croft bar and McGettigan's D9 handling the food and the match-day crowds. The 1881 house remains on the record of protected structures within the complex, a Victorian survivor wrapped in six decades of hotel extensions and at least three changes of identity.