City nightclub shuts with loss of 30 jobs

A prominent city centre night club has shut down less than two years after opening under new management, with the loss of 30 jobs.

Former staff members at The Bentley, Eyre Square, have expressed outrage over the lack of consultation from management over the closure which was only conveyed to them over the past few days.

Staff members have claimed that they were owed two weeks’ wages, plus holiday pay, after being given assurances that the club would reopen on January 20 when it shut down “temporarily” last month.

Instead of reopening for business, they only discovered that the club was not reopening through a social media page and a ‘for auction’ sign which appeared outside the premises this week.

“There was absolutely no notice give to us,” said a young barman yesterday. “Coming up to the day it closed, everything seemed grand and none of us were told anything about the prospect of the place closing down permanently. We were not told a thing when they closed down for a few days on January 13.

“They told us that they would be opening again on January 20. So we were all hoping our jobs were still there. But they haven’t been answering our calls in recent days and we found out through either Facebook on Wednesday night or a ‘For Auction’ sign outside the club that our jobs were gone.”

The company running the nightclub was set up by brothers Shane and James Broderick, from Co Mayo, in July 2012.

The brothers, who are in their early 30s, set up a company called O Bruadair Investments Limited, in which Maria Broderick and Thavakumar Subramaniam each have a 10% share.

The most recent accounts filed by the company (in November) show that O Bruadair Investments had debts of more than €310,000 and an overall deficiency of funds of more than €180,000 in the six month period up to the end of 2012.

Trade creditors were owed more than €234,000 at the end of 2012, while Revenue was owed €36,000 for VAT and PAYE/PRSI. The directors themselves were owed €22,000 at that stage.

 The Broderick brothers were unavailable for comment when contacted by the Galway City Tribune yesterday.

For more on this story, see the Galway City Tribune.