Eddie Rockets, the well known chain of inordinately expensive – but still charming – Irish “diners”, is not quite dead yet. But it is close to death, and there should no dispute, whatsoever, about why:
There is “significant doubt” over whether Eddie Rockets will be able to survive after losses ballooned fivefold and it was forced to lay off more than a third of its staff last year due to the pandemic, according to the latest accounts filed by the restaurant group.
Eddie Rockets (Ireland), which is owned by founder Niall Fortune and his wife Ann Fortune, has been in business for 32 years, has more than 50 outlets, and is the franchisor for some others.
However, in its accounts for the year ended December 31st, 2020, the company’s directors warn shareholders that the pandemic has led to a significant decline in revenues at all of its restaurant locations, and raise concerns about a possible recession in Ireland and globally. The accounts were signed off on September 30th, 2021.
There are some who will say, pointing to previous years financial performance, that Rockets was in a bit of a financial spiral anyway. And there is truth to that, but it completely misses the point:
The point is here, in the cold, hard facts: Government policy forced Eddie Rockets to close. Government policy forced it to lay off staff. Even when Government policy allowed it to re-open, Government messaging continued to scare customers away. In a sane world, the owners and shareholders of Eddie Rockets should be able to sue the Government for the catastrophic financial loss inflicted upon them by endless, rolling, lockdowns.
Here are some more facts: Many of the people now “campaigning” to save Eddie Rockets have actually spent the last year or more effectively campaigning to keep it shuttered. Exhibit A:
Ryan Tubridy has led a chorus of public anguish at news that diner chain Eddie Rockets could close following a damaging 2020.
Speaking on his RTE Radio 1 show this morning, Tubridy described Eddie Rockets as ‘One of the great mainstays of fast food in this country’ and ‘worth saving’.
He said there was ‘Nothing as enjoyable as a cracking burger, a big Coke and a bag of chips and listening to Fats Waller or Buddy Holly on the jukebox’ at its restaurants, which are decorated to resemble 50s-style American diners.
This would be, of course, the same Ryan Tubridy with one of the largest captive audiences in the country, who has actively chosen to use that platform to provide space for the most passionate advocates of more lockdowns, longer lockdowns, and more restrictions. Why, if it isn’t the consequences of his own actions.
Eddie Rockets will not be the last company to end up in this position. It is not the first, either – it is just, as yet, the most high profile.
Critics of lockdown – such as those of us who write at Gript – have long warned that this kind of situation was likely, and that it would impact the economy for many years to come. But in some ways, business closures, though terrible, are not the worst price society may yet have to pay.
After all, for over a year, we have restricted access to health screening services. That may lead to the loss of actual human lives, not only corporate lives. We have kept people cooped up, and restricted the natural human desire to mingle and socialise, with as yet unknown mental health outcomes. We have shuttered schools, and, even when re-opening them, left them as sterilised shadows of the school experience that most people knew when they attended themselves. We do not know how that will impact a generation of children. For a period in time, we locked up foreigners who came here for weeks on end.
And, of course, at the national level, we have laden the country with debt.
After all of that, after all those sacrifices, covid cases are almost as high as ever. The simple and inescapable fact is that other countries which adopted far less stringent lockdowns – such as Sweden – have come through the pandemic almost as well as Ireland has, and at much lesser social and economic cost.
As yet, there remains a significant public resistance to admitting that Irish covid policy has amounted to the single most expensive, catastrophic, failure in the history of our state. Perhaps the public and the media will never admit it: the psychological cost of doing so would be immense, after all. But for those with eyes to see, the sheer scale of the failure is undeniable.