Galway City gears up for summer of outdoor hospitality

From this week’s Galway City Tribune – Plans for a summer of outdoor hospitality are in full swing, with the city’s harbour authority set to lodge a planning application for an outdoor dining area to facilitate local businesses hammered by Covid restrictions.

This comes as Galway City Council announced this week that they will waive all fees for ‘tables and chairs licences’ in 2021 – paving the way for cafes and restaurants in the city centre to serve food outside their premises.

CEO of the Port of Galway, Conor O’Dowd, confirmed to the Galway City Tribune that they will lodge an application for temporary planning permission to enable food vans operate on a site adjacent to the Texaco garage at Lough Atalia, along with seating areas and portable toilets.

Mr O’Dowd said they had identified the site, which has most recently been used to store wind turbines, as ideal to assist hospitality businesses that had been forced to keep the shutters down for the best part of a year.

“From our perspective this will help local businesses, and I emphasise local, to operate during the summer. We have a good area of land in the city centre that we can provide to businesses whose premises may well be closed because of restrictions.

“Government has made it reasonably clear that it’s likely to be an ‘outdoor summer’ and we are in a position to offer this facility to assist local businesses,” said Mr O’Dowd.
This is a shortened preview version of this article. To read the rest of the story, see this week’s Galway City Tribune. You can buy a digital edition HERE.