How McConnell’s shoehorned their distillery into a Victorian cell block – with just millimetres to spare
John Kelly, chief executive of McConnell's Distillery
As a pupil at St Malachy’s College in north Belfast in the 1980s, John Kelly, enjoyed playing sport, but occasionally during games an overenthusiastic kick would send the ball sailing over a high wall into an adjoining property. Sometimes it would come flying back. Sometimes it didn’t. For on the other side of the wall was the notorious Crumlin Road Gaol, and in the troubled 1980s, what went in there usually took a long time to come out.
Forty years later, John is on the other side of that wall himself. “Some of my teachers probably thought I’d end up here,” he jokes. But, of course, the Crum hasn’t been a prison for nearly three decades, and John is there now as chief executive of a £12m whiskey distillery and visitor attraction housed in what used to be ‘A wing’.
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