Where have Ireland’s hotel and restaurant staff gone?

Sean Coffey had a heart attack last July at the age of 41. And the owner of Kate Kearney’s Cottage at the entrance to the world-famous Gap of Dunloe near Killarney believes keeping the business afloat during the pandemic had a lot to do with it.

“The only surprise is that it didn’t happen sooner,” he says. “I thought that was the worst time ever but this year is far more challenging.” His 170-year-old premises may be perched at the opening of a 12km mountain pass that attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors travelling on foot, bicycle, pony and trap and tour bus every year, but he has been curtailing its opening hours due to staff shortages.

[ Hospitality and tourism sector still struggling to recruit staff, research shows ]

Instead of taking life easier because of health concerns, Coffey recently found himself back doing an “80- to 90-hour week” in the bar/restaurant when the general manager hired to fill his shoes after the heart attack was nabbed by a rival business.

“The poaching is ruthless,” says the Kerry man who managed to stay open three days a week doing takeaways during lockdown and who briefly thought himself to be “in an incredibly strong position” coming into this summer. “Unfortunately, then the poaching started,” said Coffey, who estimates his wages bill hits close to €500,000 a year.

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His plans were thrown into disarray when not only was his general manager taken but his chef was also ... by a friend. “Chefs are like hen’s teeth,” he says.

Research published on Friday by Fáilte Ireland confirms this is the case, with 86 per cent of restaurants and 82 per cent of hotels surveyed struggling to find chefs.

Given the long tradition of hospitality in his family run business, Coffey says he is embarrassed that he has regularly been closing the bar at 9pm or 10pm due to staff shortages. The premises has recently been operating for just five days a week, with the opening times often dictated by bookings made by tour operators as long as a year ago.

But with students now off for the summer, he is hopeful he will soon be able to provide a seven-day menu, “although we are still very stuck for highly skilled labour”.

Award winning chef Shamzuri (Sham) Hanifa whose fine dining restaurant, The Cottage in Jamestown near Carrick-on-Shannon, is open for only two days a week, believes there was a skills crisis in hospitality long before the pandemic struck because not enough people are being trained.

The native of Malaysia, who has lived in Ireland for 22 years, and who has an interest in three Leitrim restaurants, needs to recruit two, if not three, chefs.

He has been advertising for staff for six to eight months, he says, and in total needs to recruit 13 people to meet the combined needs in The Cottage, and at his two Carrick-on-Shannon restaurants: Synergy and a steakhouse he co-owns called Buffalo Boy.

Hanifa believes many experienced hospitality staff exited the sector during the pandemic. “Chefs who were earning €700 to €800 a week could not survive on the €350 Covid payment,” he says. “People with mortgages moved into other sectors like construction or factory work and now they are earning maybe €600 a week but without the late-night work.”

Research conducted by Fáilte Ireland in late 2021 showed the majority of businesses in the hospitality sector (64 per cent) believed unsocial hours was a key factor in their problem recruiting and retaining staff, while the second biggest obstacle cited was “competition from other employers”.

With a recruitment drive in full swing and many employers increasing pay and improving working conditions in a bid to woo staff, Hanifa is worried that if the standard of service is not maintained it could do lasting damage to the sector. Friday’s update from Fáilte Ireland, a tourism barometer based on the experiences of 732 hospitality providers, shows a third of staff taken on this summer will be new to the sector, while 50 per cent of hospitality staff who will be working in Dublin during summer 2022 have no previous experience in hospitality.

Hanifa says one of the reasons he is keen not to overstretch his existing workforce is that he does not want to lose the people who have helped him build up a reputation.

New Zealand native Jess Murphy, who set up Kai restaurant in Galway with her Carlow-born husband Dave 11 years ago, is so concerned about her staff’s quality of life that her doors remain firmly shut on Sundays and Mondays even though her popular Sunday brunch was a mainstay of the business.

Murphy says she is going through a “double whammy” of price hikes and skills shortages at the moment. While she loves the business, she believes that “kitchen culture” and housing shortages in places such as Galway are making it less attractive as a career option for young people.

Kai currently has 24 staff and would need at least five more to comfortably operate seven days a week.

“There is no chance of that,” she said.

Since the pandemic started, staff from countries such as Croatia and Poland haven’t been able to return home. And because her employees are predominantly young, she says many are now planning weddings which were cancelled due to Covid. “It is a whole set of drama, a backlog of weddings, of people needing to go home to see their families, which also affects their mental health. I have not been able to go home to New Zealand for three years and I won’t be able to go home until February. And I have elderly parents.”

While Murphy says she is lucky that Galway Mayo Institute of Technology has been “knocking out amazing chefs”, she believes the kitchen culture is a turn off for potential new recruits, especially women.

“You have to ask yourself about the industry itself. Would you want your kids going into an industry where you see Gordon Ramsay screaming at people. People think that culture does not exist any more but it absolutely does.”

Her chefs work four days a week. “I want them to live their lives. I want them to be able to go away on holidays.”

She also wants them to have a place to live and increasingly that is a major challenge in Galway.

“I have staff staying on other people’s couches. I have even offered people to move into my house until they can get a house. Airbnb has been the ruination of what is going on in Galway at the moment.

“I have had three staff leave because they couldn’t find somewhere to live. I have one staff member looking for 2½ months who is actually thinking about moving back to Dublin. It is ridiculous.”

John Burke, managing director of the four-star Armada Hotel in Spanish Point, Co Clare, launched a major recruitment drive earlier this year to coincide with the completion of a €3 million expansion and refurbishment project. He hoped to recruit 100 people with a mix of perks such as night shift bonuses, private healthcare packages, maternity leave bonuses and wellbeing programmes. “We ended up getting 60,” says Burke, who expects to take on another 50 in the next couple of weeks but admits he’s still “on a knife edge” when it comes to staffing numbers. With Covid still an issue, he says, he could be down five to 10 staff any given day because of the virus or long Covid.

Weddings have long been a mainstay of the family-owned hotel and because of the huge backlog built up over the pandemic, he says, by honouring all the bookings made, he has tied up a huge proportion of his staff.

The result is he finds himself in the “alien position” of having to turn away hundreds of visitors every Saturday and Sunday who turn up expecting they can just walk in and order food.

“In 2019 we would have had 300 people for Sunday lunch but the maximum now is 80,” he said. While the hotel may no longer aim to provide 300 Sunday lunches, he feels bad for the people who for years have just turned up, confident of getting fed, who cannot do that any more because he hasn’t the staff to cater for them.

“We are turning away hundreds of people every Saturday and Sunday and it is not nice for them and it is not nice for us. Some of them get very upset.”

The worst thing about turning people away is knowing that they may not get a meal anywhere in the locality because of the same staffing issues, he says. “They often have to travel home without eating.”

The hotelier counts himself among the staff who “got out of the rhythm of late-night working” during the pandemic and knows why some are hesitant to return.

Dara Cruise, general manager of the Midlands Park Hotel in Portlaoise, Co Laoise, which has a workforce in the region of 210, has been responding to the jobs crisis by being more open to providing older employees with the flexibility of working shorter hours. “They bring a great skills set and their life experience with them,” he said. “It is a win-win situation.”