By Gráinne Ní Aodha, PA
Businesses from the hospitality and retail sectors will march to Leinster House on Tuesday to highlight the high costs facing small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs).
Former minister and broadcaster Ivan Yates will speak at the demonstration, organised by the Restaurants Association of Ireland and the Vintners Federation of Ireland.
Business owners will march from Mount Street Upper, past the Department of Finance to Leinster House over the lack of support offered to SMEs in Budget 2025.
Business owners have said that soaring energy costs, inflated input costs, added to budget changes such as increases to the minimum wage in January and the introduction of pension auto-enrolment in September 2025, is placing “immense strain” on SMEs, particularly in the hospitality and retail sectors.
Business groups have argued that the ‘Power Up’ grant of €4,000 in the budget averages out as only an extra €77 a week and will not make “any significant dent” in the cost increases facing businesses.
Chief executive of the Restaurants Association of Ireland Adrian Cummins said: “Restaurateurs, small coffee shop owners and others in the hospitality industry are hardworking people operating in what is currently an incredibly challenging business environment.
“They would much rather be serving great food and welcoming guests from across the country and across the world than travelling to Dublin to protest.
“Unfortunately, the lack of support for hospitality and small businesses in Budget 2025 made this demonstration inevitable.
“We are calling on the Government to engage with us meaningfully so that we can collaborate on policies that will fix the broken model facing hospitality businesses in Ireland today and return viability to the sector.”
Speaking on Monday afternoon, Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe said the budget “did what it could to help” businesses and that reducing the VAT rate from 13.5 per cent to 9 per cent would have cost at least €600 million.
He said income tax changes would help SME employees and their customers, but added that the government will “continue to engage” with the sector.
“The budget already does contain measures to help support small and medium-sized businesses, the decisions that were made in relation to VAT thresholds to help businesses with cash flow at a time in which we know that cash flow concerns are important to small and medium-sized businesses,” he said, speaking at the Mater Hospital.
“It contains the grant of up to €4,000 to help businesses later on in the year with the cost of energy and the cost of doing business.
“It also contained within it all the measures that we believe are capable of allowing our economy to continue to grow next year and creating the demand for goods and services upon which all small and medium-sized businesses depend.
“I know there was a long-standing case for changes in relation to VAT, but any of the changes in relation to VAT would have cost many, many hundreds of millions of euro, anywhere between €600 and €800 million, I believe, which meant that there were other things that we would not have been able to do within the budget.”
He added: “All of the measures that we have from a taxation point of view will apply to those who are working in a small business and will apply to their customers.
“While I understand the need that is there to break each budget down into individual parts, overall, what this and other budgets have aimed to do is create an environment in which our economy is growing, which has high levels of employment, and there’s the demand for the goods and services that small and medium-sized businesses supply.”
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