Food delivery company Deliveroo said it signed up more than 600 new restaurants since January this year as more outlets supplied delivery services due to the Covid-19 lockdown.

The company said that 64% of the new sign-ups were in Dublin, 11% in Cork; while Galway and Limerick saw a 6% and 4% increase respectively, as well as growth in Northern Ireland with 15% in Belfast. 

​As part of a number of response measures, a €250m Restart Grant was introduced to provide additional support for micro and small enterprises.

The grant was available to rateable businesses with a turnover of less than €5 million and employing 50 people or less which were closed or experienced a drop of 25% or more in turnover to help with costs associated with reopening and reemploying workers following COVID-19 closures. The grant was based on an enterprise’s commercial rates bill for 2019 with a minimum payment of €2,000 and a maximum payment of €10,000.

In uncertain times, it is more important than ever to share experience, insights and advice with your peers so we can all learn from one another. With this in mind, The Marketing Institute are having conversations with members across various sectors to understand how themselves and their teams have been coping with the COVID-19 pandemic, what they have learned from it and how they continue helping their customers. 

In this installment Una Fitzgibbon, Director Marketing Bord Bia, reflects on how the pandemic has impacted the work of the organisation.  READ MORE...

Following Tuesday's announcement by Government, The Restaurants Association of Ireland has sought an immediate & urgent meeting with Taoiseach Micheál Martin TD to discuss the decision / rationale to close Restaurants & Pubs Serving Food at 11pm.

These new closing times for restaurants will make thousands of businesses unviable and place tens of thousands of jobs at risk. With this new curfew, the Government has cut 90mins – 150mins of trading time for Restaurants who normally close at between Midnight and 1am.  

The deficit in the public finances was €7.4 billion in July, which compares to a surplus of €896m recorded in July of last year.  The deterioration of €8.3 billion was largely driven by increases in expenditure in response to Covid-19.   ​Overall tax revenues in July came to €4.29 billion, down 18.6% or €983m compared to the same month last year.

Hoteliers have expressed their deep disappointment at the decision announced by the Government not to increase the size of indoor gatherings from 10th August. elainaElaina Fitzgerald Kane, President of the Irish Hotels Federation (IHF) said: “We recognise the difficult balance the Government has to achieve in reopening the economy, and hoteliers are fully committed to continuing to play our part in ensuring public health is to the fore of everything we do. We have demonstrated this through our strict adherence to the operational procedures developed for our sector and we have been open for four weeks now with no public health issues.”

The Government has abandoned the 3,500 smaller pubs across Ireland following their decision to stop pubs from reopening next week according to the Licensed Vintners Association (LVA) and the Vintners Federation of Ireland (VFI). The two representative bodies now believe the sector is facing a full blown crisis which will place “intolerable pressure” on publicans, staff, suppliers and all their families.

​The Taoiseach has confirmed that the reopening of pubs, hotel bars and nightclubs will now not go ahead on 10 August as planned.  Micheál Martin also said the size of crowds gathering will remain at 200 for outdoors and 50 for indoors and he said the evidence will be reviewed again in three weeks' time.