Galway Independent Column - 9 February 2011

‘Curiouser and curiouser’ according to Alice in Wonderland, might well have been written by Lewis Carroll about an Oireachtas report recently released on the retail sector in Ireland. The report, which was three years in the making, makes no reference to the issue of excessively high retail rents, despite admitting that it was one of the major issues facing the retail trade.

It would seem to be quite extraordinary that this committee managed to sit for three years, produce a report and not mention rent…each day we see and hear the evidence of closures in the retail sector due to excessively high rents and indeed the upward only rent reviews in existing leases.

The retail sector has been particularly hard hit in the last couple of years and it doesn’t have the government support that other sectors have. There is an anomaly that while multi nationals and Irish exporters can be supported those supports do not exist for indigenous non exporting companies despite their employment credentials.

Therefore it’s sounds a bit like a line from Fr. Ted when the Chair of the Oireachtas Committee on Enterprise, Trade and Innovation accepted that the issue of upward-only rent reviews was a serious problem but claimed the committee had “run out of time” to discuss it.

He said intransigence among landlords who were charging excessively high rents was “causing serious problems for retailers and causing some of them to close” but he claimed that the committee had not discussed the issue formally because “we did not anticipate that the report would have to come out so quickly”.

The whole area of Reform is becoming key in the run up to this election. But reform grinds slow…if the results of this one committee are anything to go by. However, reform slow or not, is key to our rebuilding this economy.

In the Galway Chamber Election manifesto 2011, to be published next week, the areas identified as key by our members are:
 Job Creation and Retention of existing Jobs: this must be at the core of every Government initiative
 Reform of the Public Sector: we must cut the enormous cost of running Government
 Enterprise support: jobs in SME’s, retail, hospitality etc are just as important as jobs in the multinational sectors
 Restoration of Confidence and Competitiveness: only confidence in our future will encourage people to spend again…we need this confidence
 Government Commitment to Regional Development: we need to change the ‘Dublin’ mindset of Government in order to maximise the potential of the regions.
These are all ‘national’ issues but they all have a local dimension. It is often said that all politics is local and we can see the ‘local issues’ coming to the fore every day. But how the candidates respond to local issues can be a good barometer of how they will handle the national issues should they be elected.

Again we urge our members to question the candidates on their knowledge and their response to the business issues. Their answers should determine our votes.