Sir, – As our main streets are beingng decimated with shop closures, a whole demographic of retail is dying before our eyes. Bakers, fish mongers, tailors, newsagents, in fact the term shopkeeper is becoming an unknown job description to the current generation.
Every vacant shopfront on a main street represents more than a failed business. It represents lost employment, lost footfall, lost local identity, lost community life, and fewer opportunities for the next generation to work, trade and build livelihoods in their own towns.
Retail as we know it is changing dramatically. Bricks and mortar retail is shrinking and that is likely to continue for some time but we can make sure that a sustainable retail trading environment survives.
For too long, national policy has treated town-centre retail as if it can survive on sentiment alone. It cannot. Independent retailers are being asked to carry rising wages, insurance, utilities, rents, compliance costs and commercial rates, while competing with online platforms, out-of-town retail parks and planning decisions that drain life from the traditional main street.
RM Block
The Government must now act decisively. First, commercial rates for small and independent town-centre retailers should be abolished or radically reformed. Rates are a tax on physical presence. They punish the very businesses that keep our streets active, safe and economically productive.
Second, targeted grants should be introduced for local retail businesses that occupy town-centre units, create employment, improve shopfronts, invest in accessibility, or bring vacant premises back into use.
Third, planning policy must be rebalanced in favour of town centres. Retail should be directed first to main streets and town cores, not automatically to edge-of-town retail parks and car-dependent commercial zones. The “town centre first” principle must become a binding planning rule, not a slogan.
Fourth, Government must recognise that retail is not simply another sector. It is civic infrastructure. It gives young people their first jobs, gives older people places to meet, gives families reasons to come into town, and gives communities a shared economic life.
Ireland needs a national retail survival and renewal plan. Without it, we will leave future generations with boarded-up streets, car-dependent shopping, fewer local employers and towns stripped of their commercial purpose.
We cannot claim to value vibrant communities while allowing the businesses at the heart of those communities to disappear.
The time for reviews, reports and sympathy has passed. We need action: abolish punitive rates, fund local businesses, prioritise town-centre retail in planning, and make the survival of Ireland’s main streets a national economic priority. – Yours, etc,
BOBBY O’NEILL,
Peace Commissioner,
Wexford.
