Business owners in Northern Ireland welcome €72.3m Covid-19 recovery grant

Finance Minister, Conor Murphy pictured with Glyn Roberts, chief executive of Retail NI and Kieran Sloan, managing director of Sawers in Belfast. Picture: William Cherry/Presseye/PA

The owners of businesses that were allowed to remain open during the Covid-19 lockdown but saw their trade disappear have welcomed grants to aid their recovery.

More than £72m is being paid in £5,000 and £10,000 grants to 13,000 businesses.

That number includes one of Belfast’s best-known delicatessen shops.

Sawers managing director Kieran Sloan described days over lockdown where not a single customer visited his city-centre shop as people abided by government advice to stay at home to stem the spread of the virus.

By sharp contrast, the city was bustling on Wednesday afternoon as he welcomed Finance Minister Conor Murphy through his doors.

The minister was shown the shop’s array of produce, including caviar, pizza making ingredients which became more popular over lockdown and some hot sauces which have also increased in popularity thanks to online challenges.

Mr Sloan described how his long-established business had to adapt to the pandemic, with more deliveries and increasing its online presence.

“We had to change, if you didn’t change, you died and that was it,” he told the PA news agency.

“Footfall dropped by nearly 100%, we had no one in town. There were days when we did not have one customer in. I was standing in there by myself, we had no staff, they were all on furlough. It was frightening.

“Footfall then came back, because we are a destination shop, people began to come to us.

“But it was great on Monday to see everyone open again.

“It’s not back to normal but it’s great to see people around and Saturdays are coming back to the old Saturdays again.”

Mr Sloan said his business did not qualify for the original Covid relief grants in the first lockdown because they were able to open and welcomed the top-up grants announced on Thursday as well as the minister’s visit.

“It’s great to have all this excitement around the shop, it’s good for Belfast.”

Mr Murphy also visited Donagh McGoveran’s Centra shop in the Cathedral Quarter.

The shop saw sales drop by 70%.

“It was a significant jolt to the business,” he said.

Mr McGoveran opened the business during a time of buzz in the Cathedral Quarter with the extension of the nearby Ulster University campus and more student accommodation being built.

“It had a transformational effect on this part of the city so the pandemic was a devastating blow for all the shops in the area,” he said.

“We got a bit of an increase in footfall in September last year when things started to open up, but then we went back into full lockdown later in the year and things really didn’t start to recover until the last week or so, we’ve seen a bit of a buzz about the city centre.

“Hospitality opening up has really helped us in terms of people coming into the city centre.”

He welcomed the top-up grants from the Department of Finance.

“We would have missed out on the grants that a lot of hospitality qualified for because we were officially allowed to stay open,” he said.

“That’s why we engaged with the Department of Finance to get them to understand, they did and they listened to us and understood where we are coming from.

“So these top-up grants are the result of a lot of that interaction so it is very welcome to finally get to receive those.”