Call the social scientists. I propose a new method for tracking the social health of society and it’s called The Takeaway Index. It suggests that the moral status of the nation is tightly correlated with the amount of time we spend ordering food via apps on our smartphones. I think it stands up against accepted scientific methods.
This is, conveniently, rather good news for me. I have ordered just one takeaway in 2025. It was Monday, June 30th. I had returned from Glastonbury after a seven-hour trip home, husk-like, to an empty fridge. I scrolled through Uber Eats and ordered chicken, broccoli and some pickled cabbage, in repentance for the hedonism of recent days. I felt immediate guilt, not because it was going to be disgusting, but because I know delivery apps are wreaking havoc on the restaurant industry.
Forgive the moralising (it’s just dinner), but your beloved local trattoria’s life depends on it. In the first quarter of 2025, 150 restaurants in Ireland closed. Six-hundred restaurants, cafes and hospitality businesses closed in the 12 months from September, 2023. This is a crisis and if the impersonal data doesn’t do it for you, then look to your main street. Near to where I grew up, Gareth Smith’s restaurant, Big Mike’s (in Blackrock, Co Dublin), has been forced to shutter. The economics of the industry are “insurmountable”, he explained.
Allow me to acknowledge the cost-of-living crisis and all the hardship it places on the consumer. Regular dinner out is an extravagance beyond many. A fish pie for €20 is not trivial pocket change.
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With that out of the way, now turn your eyes to this staggering figure reported by RTÉ this summer: we spend €2.2 billion a year on takeaways. Restaurants are caught in a nasty doom loop. They were once reliant on the likes of Uber Eats or Deliveroo to survive, but those are now among the factors making brick-and-mortar restaurants less viable.
There are other things at play of course, but this part of the story is too often overlooked. During the pandemic, restaurants relied on these delivery apps to reach their customers. It was a vicious cycle; customers became too used to takeaways and restaurants grew too reliant on takeaway apps. Now, in 2025, not enough people are eating out. Or, as UCC professor Ronan Carbery puts it in a piece for RTÉ, “delivery platforms transformed from pandemic lifelines into structural threats”.
The Government is listening. Tuesday’s budget announced VAT on “food businesses” will reduce from 13.5 per cent to 9 per cent from next summer. This might dig hospitality out of the grave, but only if those in search of dinner are willing to give up their Uber Eats account too.
“It’s actually much more complicated than that.” These are the words I hear from the more annoying among you. Isn’t single-cause history out of fashion? All well and good, but this is not about the multifaceted source of hospitality’s malaise. Rising wages, cost of produce, hostile rental markets – these are all problems too. But what we are witnessing beyond the economic analysis is a much more troubling directional trend. And we have always been able to learn a lot about the world by looking at how it decides to eat.
Last I heard, society is more atomised than ever – polarised, miserable, with nasty populists in the wings and surrounded by a truculent electorate. The isolating power of the smartphone turns out to be even greater than we ever imagined – as young people in particular while away their hours, and thus their lives, scrolling through endless amounts of slop.
This radicalises some and makes loners out of others. Meanwhile, everyone wants to sit inside and order a pizza to their front door from an app. Breaking bread might be the most ancient practice, slowly being lost to the lure of the smartphone.
Ordering food off an app is a symptom of this bigger sickness. Just like the decline in shared community activities like sports teams and bridge clubs, the retreat inside to eat dinner on the sofa is part of this social atomisation. But it is a cause of the isolating spiral too.
As fewer people want to be – or can afford to be – in shared places like restaurants, is it any wonder that everyone has forgotten what is nice about it in the first place? This is a self-sustaining crash-out.
I’ve glanced into the future and it is a grim place where the dimly-lit wine bar serving pan-European small plates is closed. Also closed are the robust kitchens serving trad-hibernian fare, the seafood bars on Dublin’s south coast and West Cork’s shores. We have ceded our appetites to middlemen at Silicon Valley mega-corps. We demand lunch in a box handed to us by a low-wage gig-economy worker. All the while the local restaurant was just around the corner, begging for your custom.
