Tag Archives: Dermot Kelly

IT certainly hasn’t been the happiest of New Years at the Shannon Springs Hotel, with the prevalence of Covid-19 forcing closures and reductions in service since Christmas Speaking to The Clare Champion, co-owner Dermot Kelly said that the prevalence of the Omicron variant meant there were few options other than to scale back. “We did everything in our power to keep going but at the end of the day the safety of our team and our customers was most important. This particular variant seems to be really highly transmissible. Before Christmas Eve we had kind of said we wouldn’t open on the 26th and the 27th because they’d be too big, really and truly. “As it transpired we didn’t get to reopen until January 3 for accommodation and we’re not open to the public this coming week. We’re going to start doing take away food from this Thursday evening, we’ll have a certain amount of our team back who’ll be …

Clare Hoteliers have expressed serious concerns about the stimulus package announced by the Government which does not go far enough to support Irish tourism and safeguard the livelihoods of the 270,000 employed by the industry – including the 12,000 jobs supported locally by tourism in Clare. Dermot Kelly, Chair of the Shannon Branch of the Irish Hotels Federation states: “We are disappointed that the Government failed to deliver a reduction in tourism VAT. This is a missed opportunity given how highly effective the previous reduced VAT rate was in promoting increased employment. We now have a higher rate of VAT than 30 other European countries with which we compete. This is untenable from a competitiveness point of view and puts us at a serious disadvantage, particularly when consider our nearest neighbours Northern Ireland and Britain now have a tourism VAT rate of 5%.  We will be engaging further with the Government on this critical issues as part of the October …