When British department store group Harvey Nichols opened a 32,000 sq ft retail operation in Dundrum Town Centre in September 2005, it was supposed to be the blueprint for its expansion via smaller format shops.Located over three floors, the Dundrum outlet included a bar, a cafe, a restaurant and a food hall and there were reports of it employing 200 staff. “The Dublin store may be a more appropriate size for us. Our restaurants and bars are all part of the shopping experience, people will travel to visit them and that means that we have more critical mass,” its then commercial director, Patrick Hanly told UK trade publisher, Drapers, seven months before it opened here.Harvey Nichols went to great lengths in preparing for its Irish launch, transferring a pub licence from a bar in Crosshaven, Co Cork to Dundrum to allow it sell alcohol there. On Thursday, John Boland and Nicholas O’Dwyer of Grant Thornton were appointed as provisional liquidators to a business that had accumulated liabilities of €28.2 million and employed about 30 staff. Paying more than €1 million a year in rent, the Irish store was consistently loss-making and the bar, restaurant and food hall, which had been losing €15,000 a month, were closed a decade ago.The surprise is that Harvey Nichols kept trading here for so long. Tellingly, it hasn’t filed any financial statements for the Dundrum store since 2021. For whatever reason, its UK parent chose to keep it on life support for 20 years. But the plug was pulled when Mike Ashley’s takeover of the troubled Harvey Nicks group was announced on Thursday, leading to a major restructuring of the business. At the luxury end of retailing, Harvey Nicks’ time in Ireland coincided with the financial crash, Brexit, the pandemic and the cost of living crisis sparked by the war in Ukraine. Consumer fashion choices changed, online shopping has exploded and department stores are now anachronistic. While it had a certain following here, most Irish shoppers didn’t care enough for its range and baulked at the high price tags. Its location in the campus probably didn’t help either, situated outside the main centre amid a clatter of restaurants and cafes. This is the second time Ashley has pulled a UK department store out of Dundrum. House of Fraser was another anchor tenant at the launch in 2005 but departed in 2020 – two years after Ashley’s Sports Direct had acquired House of Fraser out of administration. Ashley told the Financial Times on Friday that he’d show a “bit of the Dunkirk spirit” to turn Harvey Nichols around. It’s a case of Dunkirk but not Dundrum for a man who made his fortune from the bargain bins of Sports Direct.