Closed for business: How the hospitality sector is being wrecked by the perfect storm

The Irish restaurant sector is buckling under an existential crisis caused by multiple factors and is in desperate need of rapid solutions, writes Joe McNamee

Restaurants are complex business models. They incur extraordinarily high costs for very low profit margins, 4% up to 8% in a very good year; highest for fast food, ever diminishing, the higher up the scale you go. 

IN THE latter half of 2023, 280 Irish restaurants and cafés were forced to close for good; 50 in November alone, too gravely wounded even to cling on until December for one last pay day in what is usually the most lucrative month of the hospitality calendar.

And yet all seasoned industry professionals could talk about back then was the grim reckoning that lay ahead in 2024, as if ’23 had been merely a series of skirmishes before the real carnage of a brutal war yet to come.