Cheesemaker threatens to quit over rates bill

After 15 years in business, a Cork cheesemaker is shutting up shop as he refuses to pay a €12,000 backlog in rates to the council.

Frank Shinnick is now considering transferring the manufacture of his cheese to Germany, where similar farm enterprises do not incur rates.

Mr Shinnick employs four people at his Fermoy Natural Cheese Company.

Mr Shinnick said his rates bill of €3,000 a year was “ridiculous” and that he was not making sufficient money to justify that sum.

He also said he is opposed to paying rates at his Fermoy farm on principal as the local authority do not provide him with water, effluent treatment, road maintenance, a footpath, or street lighting.

“If I paid the backlog of money that they are looking for, I would have gone out of business anyway,” said Mr Shinnick.

He said that sales of his Fermoy Natural Cheese have fallen by 50% in the past year, and that the only places in Ireland where sales have remained steady are in Cork and Dublin. The bulk of Fermoy cheese is now exported.

“Dublin and Cork are the only parts of the country where there is any money now,” he said. “My sales are a barometer of the state of this country. There is no money except where there are large numbers of public servants.”

When a rates evaluation team first arrived at his North Cork farm five years, Mr Shinnick told them that his public liability insurance had just ran out. He refused to allow them on to his land unless they provided their own certificate of liability.

“They refused to do it and then I got landed with the highest possible rates bill,” he said.

Mr Shinnick said 67% of new Irish businesses fail in the first year because costs are so high. He said that many Irish business owners are not “even making the minimum wage themselves yet the council want thousands in rates”.

He believes new business should be exempt from rates for the first five years of business. He also believes a business owner should be earning “at very least the minimum wage” before a local authority can seek to claim rates payments from them.

Court proceedings have been initiated against Mr Shinnick by the local authority. Last night, a spokesman said it has no function in deciding levels of rateable valuation and “is obliged to levy and collect rate based on determinations made by the Valuation Office”.

“The Commissioner of Valuation, who operates through the Valuation Office, is the sole determinant of the rateability or otherwise of a premises and the level of rateable valuation to apply,” said the spokesman.

“It is open to an owner or occupier of a premises to apply to the Valuation Office to have the valuation of a premises revised.”