'Visionary’ Mayo distillery folds before producing a drop

It was an intoxicating pitch – you could be part of history and drink whiskey at the same time.

Nephin Whiskey was going to be the first distillery in Mayo for over one hundred years.

When then Taoiseach Enda Kenny was invited to launch the project in 2014, he called it visionary.

The ultimate dream of the Nephin Whiskey Company was to open a visitor centre at the distillery in Lahardane that would see up to 40,000 visitors head for the village in North Mayo each year.

In 2019, local reports anticipated the distillery would be ‘up and running’ the following year, with the premium whiskey produced to be marketed at the premium and super premium level.

Mayo GAA legend Willie Joe Padden was brought on board by Nephin Whiskey in 2020 to speak “at home and abroad about the Nephin Distillery and our Clann Cask programme.”

You could invest in your very own 200 litre Nephin Whiskey cask for €6,500. The sale pitch boasted that you could choose the wood for your cask and instruct when to bottle the Whiskey or sell your cast.

The list of shareholders reveals a number of Mayo families did just that.

In total, an estimated €6 million was raised from investors and loans, with the project benefiting from Chinese investment through the now-closed immigrant investor programme (IIP).

This funding allowed the company to purchase and install specialist equipment into the distillery at Lahardane.

The Nephin Whiskey Instagram page now acts as a time capsule to 2019 as it documented the dream coming to life.

Unfortunately that dream came to an end eleven days ago on the second floor of an accountant's office in Dublin City Centre before a single drop of whiskey was produced in Lahardane.

Approximately fifteen people, including a number of translators and solicitors, attended the creditors' meeting where Des Gibney of McAleer Gibney Chartered Accountants was appointed liquidator of the company.

The liquidator has started the work to secure the assets of the company. The specialised distilling equipment will no doubt be a big focus of this work.

Any money that can be raised by selling these assets will be distributed in order of priority, to preferential creditors first and then unsecured creditors.

As is standard practice with all liquidations, a report on the conduct of the directors in the period leading up to the liquidation of the company will be prepared for the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement over the next six months.

Both the boardroom and courtroom battles behind the scenes of the distillery play out in the official company documents and show that two of the original founders of the company, Paul Davis and Jude Davis resigned as directors of the company in February 2024.

It is understood that Mr Davis resigned after he wasn’t supported in his nomination to go back on the board.

They were succeeded by two Dublin-based Ukrainian nationals in their seventies, Halyna Matiyash and Tamara Antonova.

The Mayo News understands that the site containing the distillery was sold in the last eighteen months and is no longer in local ownership.