John Mulligan

And the trade that you're in and the kind of difficulties that it encounters with, it's had COVID, it's had the energy crisis, all this sort of stuff to deal with.

They've done pretty well.

It was called the Drummobile Consortium, and it was a group of businessmen.

And Niall Quinn, former footballer, was involved in that too.

So they all clubbed together and no pun intended, and they said, let's buy Sunderland Football Club over in England.

And Sunderland at the time was struggling a little bit financially and otherwise too.

And so this wasn't cheap to have this kind of money around.

It was initially about 21 million euros

to buy this club and they invested, it's speculated, a total of well over 50 million euros in Sunderland during their time they owned it, which wasn't really for very long because within three years they'd sold out and they had made a loss on that investment of millions.

But Charlie Chalk was undeterred.

And that very year, Charlie Chalk was trying to get another consortium together by Newcastle Unitas.

That never came to pass.

But it just showed he had varied interests.

He had property interests in Ireland as well.

He would try to do redevelopments and that kind of thing too.

So it wasn't just the pubs.

Yeah, that's right.

And that was probably a pretty dark time for him.

But in 2003, in October, early October 2003, he and a friend, they were collecting the weekend takings from the Goat Inn in Dundrum.

And it was about 12.30 in the afternoon, so it was the early afternoon.