FROM THE ARCHIVES:The hotel business was reputedly having a difficult time in 1947, beset by continuing post-war restrictions. Quidnunc of the Irishman's Diary claimed to have found an unusually forthright hotelier who gave him the true story anonymously. – JOE JOYCE
THE HOTEL proprietors, rumour had it, were about to put up their charges for 1948.
They were complaining that their rooms, particularly Number 12a, were being haunted by a spectre who, clad only in a copy of Stubbs Gazette, was wandering around chanting the cost-of-living-index figures. I went around to a hotel-keeper to find if this were true.
“No,” he said.
“I will not attempt to disguise from you,” he went on, “that I made a lot of money this year. I happen to think that I earned it – or at least gave better value than a lot of other people in this country who made as much.
“Short of an atom bomb, I could make as much and more again next year, at the same charges.
“I have no inside information whether the cost of living is going up or coming down: it doesn’t worry me. There are so many ways that I can make up the few pounds each week if it goes up – I am certainly not going to be fool enough to tell you them – that it is immaterial.”
“Does that mean,” I asked, “that you are not going to raise your charges next year?”
“Most certainly I am going to raise my charges,” he said. “Haven’t I been as good as told to by the Tourist Board? Of course, I know very well that the reason they want tariffs raised is in order to make their own hotels pay – not from any love of the rest of us.
“I have nothing against luxury hotels of that kind; I’m all for them. But the board were awful fools to go setting them up in the country; they’ll never pay in normal times. A luxury hotel makes its money trimming visitors in the bar and diningroom, not only on its residents.
“And who wants a seven-course dinner in the middle of Connemara? Oh, you’ll always find some fools who will go to the most expensive hotel, regardless, but there are not enough of them – unfortunately, for the likes of me. However, the hotels are there, and the board has got to make a little money out of them while it can. Not wanting to look too conspicuous, they are actually begging us to put up our prices too.
“I can always salve my conscience by the thought that any extra hundreds or, I hope, thousands I make, will be so much more in taxes to help the Budget. After all, it’s Englishmen I shall mostly be soaking, because not many Irish families can afford to come here.
“I have to look ahead to the time when English people have the Continent again as an alternative. There’s no disguising the fact that most of the Englishmen coming over to Ireland for holidays now are never going to come here when they can go to Switzerland or the Riviera.”
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