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Malcolm Noonan newly elected Green Party TD for Carlow Kilkenny, having spent 16 years as a local councillor in Kilkenny.
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It was announced last week that Bewley’s Café on Grafton Street in Dublin won’t be reopening, the operators said that the lockdown, coupled with high rents, have pushed their business over the edge, and it’s no longer viable. That’s obviously bad news for the 110 staff that worked there.
Most of the comments broke down into two categories – nostalgia and protest. The first type was typified by Vivian Lambert, she said:
Such sad news about Bewleys of Grafton St. My great treat as a child was to go there for a glass of Jersey milk and a cherry bun with my Dad.
There were loads more in that vein, and I have to admit that I could probably have written my own, I have a dim childhood memory of discovering the existence of coffee when I went with my parents, just about big enough to see over the table when I was sitting on a bench there.
But, the second category of post was more political. The Green Party MEP Ciarán Cuffe tweeted
When #Bewleys was last under threat 16 years ago I called up landlord Johnny Ronan and asked could he help. “Business is business” was his reply. No change there it seem
There was much stronger criticism too, best represented by the People Before Profit official Twitter account’s tweet which said
We need decisive state action to force people like Ronan to slash his rents. The state should then move in and take a majority share of Bewley’s, to preserve jobs and enable the café to ride out the storm, as well as preserve a cultural symbol of Dublin life.
There were loads in that vein too, a lot of them critical, to say the very least, of Johnny Ronan. People Before Profit, as you heard, advocated the nationalisation of Bewley’s, other people made a variety of suggestions of market interventions the government could make to keep the café open.
These ranged from seizing Johnny Ronan’s property, to forcing him to reduce the rent, or giving a government subsidy to Bewley’s, or make some other law to make it impossible to open any other business in the premises, and other daft ideas including some suggestion of a GoFundMe to cover their costs, but I’m not sure how serious that was, there doesn’t seem to be any such campaign on the GoFundMe website.
But there is a problem with all these ideas, no matter how hare-brained or level-headed they seemed to be. It’s this: Bewley’s was a business. Bewley’s was a business, and it failed. And from my memories of the place, it richly deserved to fail.
That’s not to say anything against the staff, I never did any analysis of the business, so I don’t know why it was failing, but it was failing. In my experience it was grubby, you could write your name with your finger in the grease on the tables, the fare was substandard, and the prices were astronomical.
It’s very noticeable that the people who shared memories of Bewley’s were sharing childhood memories from decades ago. It was all about how they went there as a child, decades ago, or how the architecture or the stained glass was so nice. There wasn’t anyone saying I was there a couple of months ago, and the food was great.
And in the decades between when most of the nostalgia-tweeters seem to have been in Bewley’s last, the range and quality of food available in cafes and restaurants in Dublin has improved exponentially. And in Bewley’s it hadn’t. The food range for consumers has vastly improved because people in business big and small have invested money, talent and sweat in making it better. It’s a hugely competitive market, and new places are opening and closing every month.
All of those places have to pay commercial rents, salaries and taxes and they all compete with each other.
Whether it’s a direct government subsidy to Bewley’s, or some other advantage like forcing their rent down by banning competing businesses from opening at their location, the bottom line is that that is giving an advantage to a badly-run business and imposing a disadvantage on the better-run ones.
The bottom line is that people don’t want cherry buns any more. The newer entrants to the market thrive, for the most part because they cater to customers’ tastes. If people want avocado focaccia instead, sure, you can scoff, but are we really going get politicians to intervene and force people to keep buying cherry buns that they don’t want?
Now, I know that there’s a lot to say about Johnny Ronan and the bad politics of bailouts, and I’ve commented before on this podcast that Grafton Street, where Bewley’s is, is one of the highest-rent shopping streets in the world, with big name stores queuing to get in, and literally 100m away is South William Street, where there is a huge vacancy rate because of the insane way we tax work, instead of property.
But cruel and greedy and all as his comment is, he’s right. Business is business. If a Bewley’s can’t make a profit on Grafton street, then it’s time for them to move on and make way for a business that can turn a buck.
I know that all those people who want to seize the means of cherry-bun production for the proletariat mean well, but if you follow that logic, then every failing business would be propped up by taxing every successful business more. We’d have a lot more failing and a lot less success.
And, seriously? Cherry buns? They’re gross!
