'The greatest selling point you have is to be different - to bring something to the table no one else has'

As a child, John Brennan wasn't an obvious candidate for success. School was a difficult, upsetting place and he was always at the bottom of the class.

His battle with dyslexia meant that he felt stigmatised by a society that didn't understand him. Yet his determination to not be defined by his dyslexia created an ambition that has been matched by his business acumen. Now in his mid-fifties, John's optimism is still flowing. It is a measure of his character that, on being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, the first thing he did was to buy a very uncared for Dromquinna Manor on a waterfront estate on 46 acres of overgrown grounds. Ten years later, in the midst of a world pandemic that saw hotels closed all over the world, John again bought a new hotel.