Ciarán Hancock

speaker

1,838 appearances 14 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 4d ago

Ciarán Hancock’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 14 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.

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Inside Business with Ciaran Hancock · The 9 per cent VAT rate has been welcomed by restaurants but does the hospitality sector actually need it? · 1 Jul 2026 podcast

But that's, I mean, these are official figures from the government, OK?

And over all that time, that 15 years, so you had 12 years where you had the VAT, it seems the viability of the sector is no better

now than it was back in 2011, judging by what you're saying.

Yeah, but let me introduce... Maybe some of these businesses just aren't viable full stop.

Yeah, Barra, come back to you because Adrian is saying there he doesn't recognise those statistics that you were quoting that for every one business that closes, 11 new ones open.

Yeah, I mean, that's a fair point, actually, isn't it?

I mean, there's no doubt that the McDonald's and the Supermax and the KFCs of this world, they benefit from this as well.

And they're all probably profitable companies.

I would imagine they are.

But also the Michelin star restaurants benefit from it, too.

And they're charging, as we know, very high prices.

I mean, three figures for a tasting menu.

We've run stories over the years showing big profits.

Yeah, and there could be, like it's the same way in terms of, I'm sure there is, of the 20,000 businesses that are in food service, there's going to be... And the government did look at trying to exclude these fast food operations from this measure, but decided that it just wasn't practical.

It wasn't practical to do that.

So that would suggest that the government recognised there was a problem with this too.

OK.

And on that point, there are a lot of small businesses in this area and they're right across the country and some of them probably are really struggling and struggling.

They're probably relying on tourist numbers coming through for the summer to hang on during the winter and all of that.

So recognising that, what should the government be doing if not cutting the VAT rate?

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