Grafton Street tenants fear end of the road without intervention

“THEY’VE KILLED it, at last,” said John Corcoran, chairman of the Grafton Street Tenants’ Association, at a meeting in Dublin yesterday to mark the passing of new upward-only rent reviews.

You know when a grievance has turned into a fully-fledged crisis when it starts getting abbreviated in conversation: upwards-only rent review clauses on commercial leases were shortened to UORRs for this audience.

Bobby Kerr, chief executive of the Insomnia café chain and star of Dragon’s Den, holds 32 leases, all of which have “the dreaded” UORR.

The ban is not retrospective and most retailers are unhappily locked into leases where the only way on rent is up.

Kerr said he didn’t understand the logic of institutional landlords, who seemed intent on driving tenants to the wall: “If I close the door, the fella who comes in after me will pay less,” he noted. (Indeed, Café Sol, which took over the Grafton Street premises of O’Brien’s, is paying less than half the former rent.)

“It will probably take three years to flush out the current retailers and replace them with new ones,” Kerr surmised.

The process is already under way. After O’Brien’s, 3G, Vero Moda and Hughes Hughes . . . who will be next? The association was sure that, without emergency Government intervention in the market, there would be more closures, more job losses.

The event in Dublin’s Westbury Hotel attracted cross-party support.

For Korky’s owner Corcoran, UORRs are “a pernicious form of landlordism that would not be acceptable in most European countries”. In almost every jurisdiction, rent is adjusted annually, indexed to some measure of inflation. Only the UK and Ireland have UORRs.

The restaurateur and pub and nightclub owner Jay Bourke said he had exited his interest in Bewley’s on the street because the rent had gone up from €750,000 to €1.4 million. “If the rent had stayed at the old level, it would have made a profit,” he said.

“We did a tremendous job, turning it around, but we lost money on it and we said to hell with it.”

His experience echoed Kerr’s: the bigger the landlords, the more intransigent they were. Individual landlords, including the insolvent Liam Carroll, had agreed to rent reductions on his other leases. “We opened our accounts to them and they dropped the rents.”

Not so the Government-run Temple Bar Cultural Trust, with which Bourke is engaged in a legal dispute over unpaid rent for the premises of his Eden restaurant, Bourke claims.

“I feel like actually leaving Ireland,” he told the meeting.