“A BUDGET FOR burger barons and big builders” was how Ged Nash described the Budget announced today by the two money ministers. 

The Labour TD was far from the only politician today to run with the burger analogy but he certainly supersized it. 

Politicians and journalists alike have a job on budget day of trying to explain it all in the simplest terms. Sometimes that involves taking one aspect and framing the budget completely around it. 

Today it was easy, with the big ticket item on the agenda the promised VAT cut for hospitality businesses. 

The change means that the VAT paid by food businesses and hairdressers will fall from 13.5% to 9%. 

Over the course of a full year it will cost the exchequer €681 million but some cold feet from the government has pushed its implementation to July of next year. 

In 2026 it will therefore cost €232 million but thereafter the annual cost will be closer to the €700 million mark. 

The tax cut is of course a benefit to those who receive it but the problem, as the opposition sees it at least, is that the main beneficiary of will be multiples like McDonald’s and Supermacs. 

Those two outlets alone make about €90 million in profits between them. 

Some estimates show that about 40% of the benefit of this entire tax cut will go to the fast-food multiples.

“Budgets are about choices, and this Government has made its choice and we are going to have to live with it,” Nash told the Dáil. 

It has chosen Ronald McDonald over Joe and Joan Murphy, and your man from Supermac’s over the man who gets up early in the morning.  The Hamburglar from the 1980s McDonald’s ad is back in town swiping hundreds of millions in his swag bag from PAYE workers. 

Although Nash was the only person to invoke the long-defunct hamburglar mascot, plenty of others also brought up McDonald’s.

“The only worker to benefit is Ronald McDonald,” said ICTU’s Owen Reidy.

“The government’s McBudget is hard to swallow,” said SocDems TD Cian O’Callaghan. 

“It was a giveaway for the takeaways,” said PBP’s Ruth Coppinger. 

‘Solemn promise’

The reason the government is pushing ahead with this VAT cut is because Tánaiste Simon Harris made a “solemn” commitment to do so.

That promise came after years of lobbying from the industry, which insists there are plenty of food businesses closing and the cut was needed. 

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Adrian Cummins of the Restaurant Association of Ireland previously told The Journal that “everyone benefits” from the cut. 

“Maybe there’s an argument that larger organisations will benefit more than smaller ones. That’s a fact, but that’s the way it is,” he said.

The question has been asked of whether it was possible to introduce the cut for smaller businesses only, such as those with a revenue of less than €5 million.

However, this was complicated by the fact that many fast-food multiples operate using a franchise model. Each McDonald’s franchise is a separate corporate entity, for example. 

In addition to that, there’s even a chance there could have been a legal challenge if the government sought to tax businesses differently, something Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers alluded to today. 

“Sometimes they’re franchises, which are owned by people domestically, and there isn’t a way to distinguish that in the context,” he said.

“I’m not aware of an attempt to do it, because tax legislation has to be universal in its application, and it can be very difficult to separate a business in that context.”