VFI in shock customer-benefiting move

The Vintners’ Federation of Ireland (VFI) has called on drinks suppliers to refrain from imposing a price increase next month and has asked the Joint Oireachtas Committee to support a freeze of further price rises.

Of course, it’s only customer-benefiting by side-effect:

[VFI president Mr Séamus O’Donoghue] said over 200 pubs had closed since the introduction of the smoking ban in March 2004 and that “few, if any” could afford increased costs on a profit margin of 32c per pint sold.

He also quoted several other gloomy figures, such as volume sales down by anywhere from 10 to 25 per cent, and how prosecutions taken against breaches of the anti-smoking legislation were exclusively against the pubs and in no cases against the customers who were smoking. Strange; I seem to recall that the people who assumed that if the pub said it was ok, they could smoke (in Galway, shortly after the introduction of the ban), were prosecuted. The nice thing about being in a lobby group is that you don’t need actual facts to back up your statements, just vehemence and indignance and things of that nature.

(of course, I don’t have anything to back up my perspective, either. A report published in December 2004 mentions that 11 premises have been prosecuted (one being fined €100 rather than the maximum fine of €3,000), and the actual legislation, as best I can tell, is mostly concerned with business owners who break the law, so Mr. O’D may indeed be correct in his assertion that it’s all about prosecuting the publicans)