Caveat: Wetherspoon may need a bar extension for its Irish invasion plan

Some of the agonised revisionism and counter-revisionism over the last week about the 1916 Easter Rising and British rule were almost enough to drive some of us to drink. Except for last Friday, of course, when not a drop could be bought.

We can’t blame the Brits for that. The Good Friday booze ban is all down to the Intoxicating Liquor Act of 1927, brought in by Kevin O’Higgins, Free State minister and member of the Irish Volunteers.

One wonders what the most recent supposed British invaders of Ireland, the listed JD Wetherspoon pub group, made of it all.

It is three years since Wetherspoon first hatched a plot to conquer Ireland with 30 pubs. It became public knowledge that September, when founder and British nationalist Tim Martin unveiled the plan to a chorus of righteous blubbering from a few patriotic pint-suppers here.

September 2013? The centenary of the famous WB Yeats poem about Irish nationalism being sold out to fumble in a greasy till. Oh, the irony. If Martin had only added two more pubs to his original target, or better still, subtracted four from it, it would have really boiled the brew of the pub protectionists. The banshees said Wetherspoon would ruin the industry with its no-craic crackpot ideas about what makes a good pub.

It hasn't decimated anything, of course. It has simply brought some price competition and choice to a few local areas and stood up to the draught beer distribution duopoly of Diageo and Heineken, unlike the quivering locals.

As this week’s Central Statistics Office retail sales figures show, bar sales are up by more than 7 per cent on an annual basis and the industry is booming once again in towns, cities and anywhere tourists roam.

So what now of Wetherspoon’s plan to open up to 30 pubs over five or so years? In the months that followed the announcement of its plan to expand across Ireland, the recovery in the sector began to take hold. It looked like perfect timing, but the reality is that it was probably already too late for Martin’s grand plan.

Wetherspoon now has five pubs here: in Swords, Blanchardstown, Blackrock and Dún Laoghaire in Dublin and in Cork. It faces opposition to plans for outlets on Camden Street in Dublin and on Arundel Square in Waterford, but nothing it won’t overcome.

It secured permission for a pub in Carlow last September and it also appears to have plans in train for Douglas in Cork. It is also working on a plan for a large site on Abbey Street in Dublin, where it bought a former church. Sure, don’t the Irish worship the drink?

By this time next year, four years after it started plotting, Wetherspoon will have about 10 outlets. But it won’t get the next 20 too easily to finish out its plan.

Wetherspoon paid €1.475 million, almost four times the guide price, for the Abbey Street church, which it will join with an adjacent site for which it paid €1.5 million. That’s far more than its average cost of site development in the UK.

Pubs in good locations are expensive and sought after now. Wetherspoon should have struck decisively when the banks that backed the sector during the boom – Ulster Bank and Lloyds/Bank of Scotland – were selling off pub loans as they deleveraged a few years ago. It could have plucked an entire portfolio and gained immediate scale, albeit appearing to profit from the misery of distressed local borrowers.

Now, it faces competition from a slew of private equity-backed local buyers for every decent pub that comes on the market. Wetherspoon may eventually build out a nice little Irish pub business, if it perseveres. But it won’t be cheap.

Footnotes . . .

Dunnes Stores is continuing with its one-company mission to ensure the commercial viability of the entire Irish legal system. It is now being sued for allegedly not paying debts by law firm Eversheds, which has acted for it in the past.

The case was filed in recent weeks, and the head of Eversheds' real estate division, Joe Stanley, has put in an affidavit, which may give a clue as to the nature of the work Eversheds did for Dunnes prior to the dispute. It is due for mention in the High Court this Monday, with a motion for entry onto the Commercial list, which normally only hears rows over amounts of more than €1 million. Dunnes has yet to file a defence to Eversheds' request for a quick-fire summary judgment, but the retailer is likely to fight its corner.

Eversheds is represented in the case by its rival firm, Mason, Hayes & Curran.

Dunnes, meanwhile, has kept it in the family and is formally represented by its own internal legal department.

Better value beats them all.

Michael Scully, the Cork farmer-turned-developer whose boomtime property forays into Poland turned sour for his Castle Carbery Properties, is getting into the whiskey distilling business. Perhaps he will save a drop for those farmers who lost money after financially backing his plans for Poland.

Scully and his wife have just registered a new company, Clonakilty Distillery, which they originally called the Clonakilty Whiskey Company. Its formation documents said the main activity would take place at the Scully farm. There seems to be a new distillery opening up every week these days.

Castle Carbery, meanwhile, is still meandering its way through liquidation. During the boom, it set up the Polska Fund in partnership with SWS Corporate Services to raise cash for property investments in Poland. Investors, mostly Munster farmers, put in more than €21 million, but the proposed developments were not finished before the crash and they lost much of their money.

They launched a lawsuit against Castle Carbery and SWS Corporate Services more than two years ago, but very little appears to have happened with the case since Carbery went bang last year.