Popular Shanahan's on the Green announces shock 'temporary ...
Well-known Dublin restaurant Shanahan’s on the Green has temporarily closed while its owner tries to unfreeze its bank accounts and source funds to reopen the venue.
The online booking portal for the St Stephen’s Green location, self-styled as an authentic American steakhouse and seafood restaurant, is “temporarily offline”, according to Shanahan’s website.
The upmarket steakhouse is owned by John Shanahan.
He has said the business is now in a “horrific situation”.
The American, with dual Irish nationality, opened the venue in 1998 after refurbishing the Georgian building in which it is based.
But in an email yesterday to suppliers, seen but not verified by the Irish Independent, Mr Shanahan confirmed that the restaurant is facing significant financial challenges.
Efforts to contact the restaurant and Mr Shanahan yesterday were unsuccessful.
In his email, Mr Shanahan said that the restaurant is in an “alarming, almost impossible position”.
He said its difficulties stem from the Covid pandemic, but also due to long-running construction work beside the restaurant that negatively affected its trading for more than two years.
In the email, Mr Shanahan said he had been anticipating a “promised meeting” with Revenue to discuss repayment of the restaurant’s “Covid, Vat/PAYE demands”.
Businesses across the country were able to avail of special measures from the Revenue Commissioners to enable them to deal with the impact of the pandemic. Those measures included being able to “warehouse” tax debt until such a time as the crisis had passed and businesses were operating normally again.
However, Mr Shanahan said that before the arranged meeting, the restaurant’s bank accounts were frozen.
“If I can’t arrange an immediate, workable plan to get our frozen bank accounts released (believe me, I’m doing everything possible), I will have to make a quick trip to the US to get the money to get us back on track,” he noted in the email.
The company behind the restaurant, JMS International Holdings, is registered in Delaware in the United States.
The latest set of publicly available accounts filed for that firm in Ireland date from 2011 and were only filed in 2020. They show that at that stage, the firm behind the restaurant was sitting on $12.6m in losses.
“It’s hard to believe that Shanahan’s on the Green restaurant, with over 24 years of making Dublin and Ireland proud, mostly because of our 41 talented, dedicated employees – and during those years paying over 26 million in taxes – we should find ourselves in this horrific situation,” his email reads.
He added that for over 24 years, the business “met our revenue and business obligations”.
“Our present problems started with the unfortunate Covid malaise – and after that, the huge Eircom building, contiguous to Shanahan’s, was in the process of being demolished and rebuilt,” he said.
“This created a more than two-year unsightly, vibrating, filthy mess, having many regular patrons and tourists tell me they thought we were either out of business, or closed for the duration.
“Unfortunately, this revenue, account, freeze (sic) will not allow us to move forward with our plans, so, until further notice, we will have to cease doing business as usual I feel confident that I will resolve this matter quickly and have all taxes and vendor invoices satisfied quickly!”
Mr Shanahan told staff and suppliers that he may have to visit the United States “to pull this all together”.
