Not many protest marchers need to be told the route to Dáil Éireann, but restaurateurs and publicans are not usually the protesting types.
About 1,000 members of the restaurant and pub trade left their businesses behind for a day to march from the Peppercanister Church in Dublin to Dáil Éireann via the Department of Finance where they blew whistles loudly and jeered.
“I don’t think I have ever been out on the street with a placard before,” said the matriarch of the Ballymaloe House business, Darina Allen. She got up at 6am to catch the early train to Dublin to walk with the other protesters.
Her business was doing okay, she said, but five restaurants had closed near her in Midleton, Co Cork and one restaurateur she knew hadn’t “paid herself for three months”.
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The main gripe among restaurateurs has been the Government decision made a year ago to restore the VAT rate from 9 per cent to 13.5 per cent and the failure to offer supports in the budget save for a €4,000 grant to help with energy costs.
Ms Allen said this came on top of increases in the cost of energy, the minimum wage and the price of raw ingredients which were driving small businesses to the wall. “These businesses are the life and soul of rural areas. Why did they not bring the VAT rate down to 9 per cent? I don’t understand. There is quite a lot of money in the exchequer to help people.”
The march was organised by the Restaurants Association of Ireland and by the Vintners’ Federation of Ireland (VFI) in the wake of more than 600 restaurants closing since the 13.5 per cent VAT rate was restored in September last year.
VFI chief executive Pat Crotty said the major drink suppliers were dealing with 1,400 fewer pubs than they were three years ago. He acknowledged that drinking patterns were changing and people were going to pubs less frequently, but the last “two years is entirely down to the Government”. Along with VAT, the minimum wage has increased by 36 per cent in the past four years. “There is no way we can put up our costs by that amount. The Government is putting people out of business.”
Joan McManus of the King Sitric pub and restaurant in Howth said her twice-monthly bill for VAT was in the order of €47,000. “Customers think there is a rip-off going on, there isn’t.”
Conor Maher of the Oarsman pub and restaurant in Carrick-on-Shannon said many businesses going to the wall were those with high standards. The Oarsman was busy, he said, but “we are treading water, we are finding it really tough. Something is broken.”
In Molesworth Street opposite the Dáil, RAI president Paul Lenehan, who co-owns four businesses in Co Kildare, exhorted those present to turn around and cheer themselves for the size of the crowd they had generated.
“None of us want to be here. We have been left with no other choice. We want to be at home in our restaurants, pubs and cafes doing what we love. We are the heartbeat of our towns and cities.”
Eimear Killian, manager of the Builín Blasta Cafe and Bakery in Spiddal, Co Galway, said the VAT rate hike had come on top of food costs trebling in the past two years.
“We are busy but we are not making any money. We are not going to be millionaires out of it. We just want to be able to pay our mortgages,” she said to cheers.
Cathal Sheridan of Sheridan’s Bar and Restaurant said he was the seventh generation of his family in the business, but there won’t be an eighth one if things did not “change immediately”.
“We will have to go to the Costa del Sol to see an Irish pub,” he said.
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