“THIS IS a bit like going to Confession for me,” Derek Hughes has told a Retail Excellence Ireland event. The founder of the Hughes Hughes bookstore chain said he had always wanted to attend a conference where all the speakers were not glorious success stories, where there was someone for whom it had not quite worked out. Now he was that guy.

The “independence day” event, held in Dublin’s Burlington Hotel yesterday, was dedicated to helping independent Irish retailers “stand out from the crowd” at a time when the crowd is being decimated by recession, rents and a revolution in retail models.

When Dublin airport’s Pier C was closed in 2008, €8 million was written off Hughes Hughes’s turnover, while a WH Smith outlet opened at London City Airport just six doors up from its existing store.

The chain was eventually forced out of Heathrow’s Terminal 5 following WH Smith’s exclusivity deal with BAA, while a contract at Shannon was also given to WH Smith after a five-year review. It could absorb the kind of losses that Hughes Hughes could not.

Just as airline passenger numbers collapsed, the book retail market contracted by 15 per cent.

The winners were Tesco, which took 12 per cent of the market, and Amazon, with 10 per cent.

Hughes Hughes went into receivership in February 2010. In May 2010, Sivota Ltd bought the assets of six of the Hughes Hughes shops and Mr Hughes himself was approached to take a shareholding and run the business.