City vintners bank on return to extended opening hours to save their sector

THE city’s publicans are pinning their hopes for spring survival on a return to extended opening hours from the beginning of next month, following the lifting of some isolation and foreign travel Covid restrictions over the past week or so.

Johnny Duggan, Chair of the Galway City Vintners Federation told the Galway City Tribune, that since the introduction of the 8pm pub curfew on December 20 last, publicans were just battling ‘to keep the show on the road’.

“Of course, it’s not viable, in terms of an economic proposition. Take by own pub (Taylor’s] for example – we are closed Monday to Thursday; we open from 5pm to 8m on Fridays; and 1pm to 8pm on Saturdays and Sundays – a total of 17 hours a week.

“But we are trying to hold onto staff and offer a service to our regular customers as we found that following the closure for the first six months of last year, it was very difficulty to get the business up and running again,” said Johnny Duggan.

He added that the pub, restaurant and hospitality sectors across the city were now hopeful that ‘the change will come’ in early February as regards a return to more normal trading hours.

“There have been some hopeful signs over the past couple of weeks on a number of fronts including the easing of restrictions on foreign travel; the relaxing of the isolation and testing restrictions; and also, that omicron seems to be a quite mild variant of Covid with hospital and ICU cases remaining quite stable,” he said.

Publicans, he added, were faced with ongoing dilemmas in relation ito what days they opened and  also in terms of how they allocated tables either for ‘walk-ins’ or ‘bookings’.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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