The first exposure that your correspondent had to economics was in St. Macartan’s College, Monaghan, where economics was a subject offered to us for the leaving cert. It was taught at the time by an exceptional and committed teacher by the name of Dan Murphy, and one of his first lessons to us as 15- or 16-year-olds was about the difference between the public sector, and the private sector, in which he cited the example of Great Southern Hotels.
Great Southern Hotels, for those of you not old enough to recall, was a state-owned chain of hotels that operated 15 hotels across the state from roughly the period of independence until what remained of the group was finally dissolved, having disposed of all of its properties, in 2006. Mr. Murphy cited this, as I recall, as an example of sensible privatization, on the basis that the state has no business running loss-making hotels because the private sector is more than happy to provide that service, and almost always does it more efficiently.
In the almost twenty years since Great Southern finally disappeared, the Irish state has not, by and large, been in the hospitality business. Until this week, when a hairbrained scheme to buy off the people of Roscrea seems to have been conceived in record time, and without any great deal of thought:
The Government has agreed “in principle” to support a plan to purchase a disused hotel in Roscrea as a “community hotel” as part of moves to defuse tensions over the accommodation of asylum seekers in the town.
Jackie Cahill, the Fianna Fáil TD for Tipperary, presented the plan to Minister for Integration Roderic O’Gorman at a meeting today.
Speaking on Tuesday evening, Mr Cahill said that Mr O’Gorman had indicated that there was agreement in principle among the Government parties to support the project and to examine mechanisms, including funding mechanisms, that could be used to support it.
Sometimes it is important just to state one’s opinion plainly: This is a terrible idea. For several reasons.
The first, and most pressing, is that politicians now seem to be thinking and acting (more accurately, reacting) in a state of panic to events as they happen, without any kind of coherent plan. There are, at a conservative estimate, more than a hundred towns and villages across Ireland that boast abandoned or derelict hotels who might reasonably wonder why the people of Roscrea are going to get a “community hotel” when they themselves are not. My own hometown, for example, boasts a once-grand hotel that has lain idle for more than a decade for the simple reason that successive owners were unable to make it commercially viable. I can predict with some confidence that securing the same deal for that town, and the hotel in question, as the one being mooted in Roscrea will now be a priority for local negotiations should any question of migrant accommodation arise in the coming months.
Second, there are obvious questions about the nature of a “community hotel” that have not been asked. Is a hotel a business, or a community amenity, for example? If it is the latter, as this plan tends to suggest, then does the hotel have any obligation to make a profit? Can community amenities really ever be closed simply for not being profitable? You wouldn’t close a playground, for example, because it wasn’t making money.
If a hotel is a community amenity which need not make a profit, then how large need a community be before it is entitled to one of its own? How many community hotels might the Government end up operating?
Do the employees in such hotels work for the state – and get state pensions – for example, or will they be private sector employees? What Government department ultimately runs community hotels? The Department of Tourism? Local Government?
More pertinently, what license does a hotel that is also a community amenity have to compete against local private businesses? Can it undercut them on prices since it is a state-operated entity for the benefit of the local community? Does it offer subsidised communion dinners or reduced-price wedding parties for locals? How fair is that on anyone else with a hospitality business in the region?
Any look at this plan that went beyond a five-minute panicked “what can we offer the locals to shut them up” meeting might detect all these potential problems, but our political class now appears to be in such a desperate state of panic that the apparent priority here was not to think matters through, but to rush the story into print for the Wednesday morning papers, in order, one suspects, to set an example of the Government’s willingness to work with locals. This was then followed up by a signal from Government that other goodies might be on offer to local towns and villages across the country that are good enough not to cause a fuss over any potential new neighbours.
Politics being what it is, none of this will go unnoticed by other communities in the same position. In one panicked move, the Government has just made negotiations with communities over immigration much more challenging than they were even two or three days ago, and has set what will be – if the plan goes through – a disastrously stupid precedent in both economic and political terms.
It’s not been a great start to 2024 for our political masters, you’d have to say.