A Dungarvan publican says the shortage of tourist accommodation in the town is affecting the hospitality industry.
Emilene Stafford of Merry's Gastro Pub says the West Waterford town is experiencing a fall off of 350 tourists every day.
This comes as many high-profile and well-established restaurants nationwide have shut their doors in recent weeks.
Emilene has also expressed her disappointment in those who have sold hotels and restaurants to become emergency accommodation. She believes no venue is safe and a reputation ‘counts for nothing’ anymore.
“I'm here 16 years last week”, Emilene outlined to Jordan Norris in an interview on WLR’s Déise Today.
“When I first came to Dungarvan, it was a very different town than what it was today. I remember Paul Flynn coming into me and we'd be joking about the tumbleweed on the streets.”
“I think it's quite terrifying”, she conceded. “When we looked at Dungarvan this summer, we had a restaurant close in the height of the summer. There was not tumbleweed, but considering what the town was the year after COVID and how busy it was, the streets were packed with tourists, with Irish tourists, overseas tourists, it was a fabulous energy and atmosphere around. Everybody was buzzing and was getting their business back on track after a very difficult few years with COVID.”
However, in the context of an accommodation crisis, soaring overheads and a resultant fall in tourist numbers, all is no longer merry.
“We're in a situation that as a bar or a restaurant, you always can fight your corner and do what you need to do for your business - but when the government is actively taking tourism beds out of a small town and giving them for non-tourists, it's a major problem. There's approximately 350 tourists a day gone out of this town”, she revealed.
“So, we have a population in this town of just short of 11,000. Everybody depends on the three months of the summer. There’s only three months of the summer, yet there's very few beds for the tourists to come and stay.”
“Dungarvan has been the talk of the country for years. It was on Nationwide almost every second week. Everywhere you turned, people were talking about Dungarvan's great, Dungarvan's fabulous. I want to come to Dungarvan.”
“My own family couldn't visit down here. Friends of mine that I've grown up in Dublin couldn't visit down here because they could not get beds. The fact that hoteliers thought it was OK to cancel tourists that were booked, rooms that were booked. We had parties booked in here with groups coming for family reunions. They were booked into town to stay in town and receive emails from the hotel saying, we can no longer honour your reservation. That’s because those beds were taken from tourists and given elsewhere.”
“That is a major problem”, said Emilene. “The government need to answer up to this. The government need to help hospitality.”
‘Reputation counts for nothing’
260 restaurants have closed in Ireland in the last six months, but this is something Ms. Stafford believes is only the tip of an iceberg.
“The rate of businesses closing in this country at the moment is terrifying. Everybody in hospitality, bars, restaurants, every day you take it as it comes. I just don't know what more anybody can do, because if the government is not prepared to help us - then you have people that just think it's OK to turn their back on their regular customers, on the town they live on, and just not even help us fight to keep the people in this town.There's a major problem.”
Emilene and her staff celebrated being crowned as Munster’s Best Gastro Pub recently.
“When you are in business, you have to try and figure out a way to get everything to the customer as cheaply as possible”, she explained. “Therefore, they don't take the brunt of it, but when people are removed from your streets, you can't even fight a corner, you're not even getting the customers coming to you because there's nowhere for them to stay. It makes it next to impossible to actually maintain keeping your doors open, because there's nobody there.”
“The government has removed the people from the streets. If you look at everything, overall cost, and you look at Cork, all of these places that have been around for a long time with great reputations.”
“I would always be confident in my business because I love it - it's a passion that I have. That doesn't mean anything anymore. It doesn't make a difference how good you are or how much you believe in your product and how much you believe in hospitality.”
“It's irrelevant”, she lamented. “Anybody can go at any point now because there's just nothing there to help us. Reputation is a lot in the hospitality industry, but our reputation no longer pays the bills.”
Footfall fall-off
While the nationwide consensus would be that many venues are closing permanently on account of a quiet January and February, that is certainly not the case in Emilene’s eyes. She says anyone that has boarded up, has been walking a tightrope for at least 18 months.
“I think the scary thing is, if we look back in the summer that we just had and look at Christmas that we just had, the numbers are down across the board.”
“Any people that are closing their doors today across the country - they're not closing the doors because of a dry January or a bad January. They're closing the doors because of the previous 24 months.”
“It doesn't take one month or two months, you know, to make such a decision to close your doors. It's months. It's a good year at least. All of that is on the back of what we've just come through. The problem is there's nothing on the horizon. There's no beds coming, opening up all of a sudden in this town or in any other town. The government is still taking away tourism beds.”
“From that point of view, if you're in a sticky situation, it's not like you can say, OK, I can ride the wave out. I can wait until summer. We'll have a bumper summer. I'll be OK.”
“All these premises that have closed, they're closed because they just know they can't do it. There's nothing coming to help them.”
Hotel shortage
Despite having been acknowledged in international publications such as the New York Times, Condé Nost and LonelyPlanet, Dungarvan has in a sense struggled to accommodate those who wish to take it in.
Only two hotels currently operate in the West Waterford town, while planning permission has been granted for a boutique hotel and planning permission is sought for a substantial aparthotel. Emilene believes Dungarvan eateries and bars will not be able to survive without the arrival of another hotel.
“As a business owner, and even if I wasn't a business owner - for Dungarvan as a town to survive, I think it's essential that these go ahead. The fear of this hotel not going ahead is what's almost traumatising, to be honest, because we need these beds in this town.”
“There’s one hotel in town that's no longer for tourists anymore. That's not going to come back. We have another hotel out on the beach by Clonea Strand that's gone. It's not for tourists either. We don't have options there.”
“The only options we have are new hotels to come in. If planning gets rejected for new hotels, well - the future is bleak, really”, she warned.
“There needs to be a subsidy for towns that have lost tourism. There needs to be help with energy, with everything, but primarily I do think when beds have been removed from a town, tourism is the main thing that's going to have to be helped.”
“Somehow the government has to do it. During COVID, they were fabulous. They went above and beyond. Waterford City & County Council helped everybody. You know, we all came together. We all worked together and everybody came through. The closures during a pandemic are far less than the closures of what we're seeing in this country now today in hospitality. That’s what's terrifying.”
‘Ireland is lost’
Many people have been forced to sacrifice their livelihoods and retrain given how unviable it has become to operate as a publican or within the hospitality sector post-2020, and Emilene believes the country as a whole has “lost its way”.
“I think it's sort of impossible for a lot of people. It’s sad, because when people are in hospitality, they give everything to it. It becomes your home. It becomes part of your life. You have nothing else.”
“For people to have to make a decision to close their doors because the fight has been taken away from them - it’s not right. The government has to stop. They have to listen. They can't keep going the direction they're going. We can see what's happening around the cities, around the country, with different people taking it into their own hands.”
“The government are going to have to listen and do something because it's just not right. Our country is getting lost in many ways. The anger that people are holding right now, it's awful. It’s not a nice way to be on such a small island. We all want to help people from other countries. Obviously, we do. We have to do our part, but the government is going to have to see a way to do this differently. There has to be other options and there has to be ways to help hospitality.”
A bus and car on fire on O'Connell Street in Dublin city centre after violent scenes unfolded following an attack on Parnell Square East where five people were injured, including three young children.
“There has to be some sort of aid given to hospitality. VAT at 9%, even bringing it back to the 9%. It's something - but even still, that's definitely not enough. We can't see all these places close. It's heartbreaking. The number one tourist attraction in this country is the Irish pub.”
Tip of the iceberg
On a recent trip around Ireland, the stark reality of what faces the Irish hospitality industry became particularly apparent to Emilene.
“I was away in the Aran Islands with a friend for the last week. “I drove from Galway back to Dungarvan, and I could not find until I got to Tipperary - a place to stop to have a drink, to have a cup of coffee, to go into a restaurant. We were going to stay in a hotel and all the hotels were closed.”
“I was driving for five and a half hours. Five and a half hours before we found a place. I mean, that says something. It does speak for itself.”
Will it get worse before everything gets better? This publican certainly seems to believe so.
Closed up shops whilst Ireland remains in lockdown to curb the spread of coronavirus.
“It's definitely going to. We haven't peaked at how bad it's going to get yet. It's only starting now with restaurant closures, bar closures. It's 100% going to get worse, because there is still tourism accommodation being taken out of small towns in Ireland and cities in Ireland.”
“That's not been replaced with anything, because in Ireland, it takes a certain amount of time for a premises to be built. For argument’s sake, if Dungarvan gets a new hotel - it would be at the earliest, the tail end of 2025 before we'd see anything viable to open. So therefore, hospitality in Dungarvan, all they have to hang on to is the development of that premises, that is being built for tourists, purpose built for tourism. We’re lucky that hopefully we might have these on the agenda.”
However, what if they weren’t, she asked herself.
“If they weren't on the agenda, then why bother, what is there to look forward to? I don't see how it's going to get better any time soon. There’s nothing that is going to change. The overheads are still going to be as expensive as what they are.”
“Everything is going to stay the same. Unfortunately, with every single tourist that may want to come into your town, unless there's beds there for them, it's irrelevant.”
‘I cried every day’
Asked if she had ever arrived at a point in time when she had to consider a permanent closure, Emilene offered this response.
“Well, I came here 16 years ago and I was in my 20s. Now, I feel like I'm in my 90s. I came here 16 years ago, I had three years, I'll be honest, when I cried more or less every day because it was so terrifying.”
“I'd taken over a business that didn't do food. I wasn't from the town and I was green behind the ears. I was lucky I had the guidance of my father, like who had been in business and he was down helping me. It was a terrifying time.”
“Would I ever want to go back there? Absolutely not. Might that happen, that this presents itself to me again? There's every possibility. There's every possibility. It could happen to anybody in hospitality now. That’s the scary thing.”
If she had an opportunity to speak to her younger self and warn of what would be coming down the tracks, would Emilene Stafford still take the leap and become a publican? Probably not. Nobody is ‘safe’, she remarked.
“I use that word loosely. No matter how hard you work today, it's irrelevant”, conceded Emilene.
“No matter how many great customers you have and great staff you have and great locals that you have, it still doesn't make a difference because businesses need to get so many people in their doors in order to stay open because the overheads are so high.”
A changed landscape
If you look in Dungarvan on a Monday, is there any businesses even open anymore on a Monday? Very rarely - and if anything, they close earlier. I was a business that was seven days, seven nights. Now I'm a business that's six days opening at three o'clock. I don't open for lunch anymore in midweek, only at the weekends.”
“That’s my hours cut because there's nobody there. I have to condense what I can to keep my overheads down. If I met somebody today, if I met me today, and I was saying, ‘oh, I'm going to move to Dungarvan and open up a gastro pub, I would be telling me, don't even think about it.”
“I would definitely move to Dungarvan because it's a fabulous town, but as far as going out and being self-employed, I fear for anybody starting that journey now.”
“All you're hearing every day, it's a new story of somebody closing. Hospitality is definitely being attacked all the time. It is what it is.
“I doubt there'll be very many people looking to open up and go into business today. A lot of people are going. Will I, Emeline Stafford, owner of Merry’s Gastro Pub ever do that? No, because I love hospitality.”
“It's in me. It's what I love to do - but I fear for what's down the road for everybody.”
