The Goodbody legal and stockbroking family did rather well when it sold its Connacht Court textile retail group to Johnson Service for the equivalent of €36 million (£28.3 million).

Three Goodbodys - Oliver, Trevor and Malcolm - picked up more than half of the Johnson money, while AIB Capital Markets and ACT trebled their 1996 investment in Connacht Court.

Since then, Johnson Service has been struggling to make Connacht produce anything like a decent return, and there is little doubt that the Goodbodys and their venture capital backers did a whole lot better out of this deal than Johnson.

This year, Johnson closed down Connacht's Rathfarnham operation in Dublin with the loss of 80 jobs.

Figures this week from Johnson show, when the Rathfarnham operation is excluded, that the Connacht group was able to increase operating profits to £1 million sterling (€1.6 million).

Profit margins for the group increased from 5 per cent to almost 9 per cent.