Midlands restaurant owner gets electric bill size of house deposit

A restaurant owner is unable to sleep after getting an enormous electricity bill which she likened to a downpayment on a house. 

Edel Connolly has run The Hare’s Corner in Mountmellick with Brían White and Johnny Connolly for the past 14 months. 

The business in the Mountmellick Development Association Business Campus in Irishtown, which employs 13 full and part time staff, is still reeling from its last €13,000 electricity bill and has now been hit with an even larger electricity bill.

“I don’t know what to do. I can’t sleep, I don’t even want to answer my phone now,” said Edel. She was too upset to reveal the exact amount owed for electricity as she didn’t want to be reminded by reading it online but says the business is now in survival mode.  

“The electricity bill would be a 10 percent down payment on a three bedroom house and we don’t make that in a week,” a noticeably upset Edel said.

“It is not sustainable. I don’t want to read how much it is. It is killing me,” she remarked. 

Edel said The Hare’s Corner are being punished for being unable to settle the last bill which meant they were taken out of contract and placed on higher electricity rates. 

“We are being punished because we weren’t able to clear it(the last bill), they tripled our rates,” she explained. 

Edel recalled the first electricity bill 14 months ago being €800. “It kept getting higher and higher and came to the stage where the money wasn’t in the bank,” she said.  

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The crippling bill was compounded by council road works in recent weeks which Edel said prevented people from accessing the restaurant and cost the business thousands of euro in recent weeks.

Aside from the energy bill hikes, Edel said she has been impacted by inflation across the board. “It is not even only the electricity, it is everything, the VAT, the wages, everything, food suppliers,” she remarked. 

While the government's 40 percent energy support scheme is welcome, Edel said it will barely put a dent in a bill that has increased by 300 percent.  “The only thing I can do is keep chiseling away at them(The bills),” she said. 

The Hare’s Corner is immensely popular in Mountmellick and is a hub for the community often used for events and functions.  

“We have great support. We had to close the other day because we sold out,” said Edel, who added that the business has supported any local organisations seeking help.

Edel took to social media to inform her customers that they would have to increase prices in order to survive.  

 “We have held off so much out of not wanting to potentially lose our lovely customers and supporters but we have gone into survival mode and are not allowing the doings of our own country to damage us any further so we have to as of this week slightly amend the pricing, always with the intention of lowering pricing when the government take the saddle and set of reigns off of our backs,” she wrote. 

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“Receiving a bill that could be a down-payment on a three bedroom semi detached house is not what the restaurant industry needs right now and cutting corners and staff seems to be the only other advice given, advice that we will not bow to in order to line the pockets of companies that can gloat on a 600m profit for six months,” she added. 

Edel said the increase in prices will hopefully help pay the electricity bills. “We won’t make any profit, we know we won’t make any profit,” she  explained. 

Although she acknowledges the fact that the business cannot survive a year of bills of this magnitude, Edel is clinging to the hope that things will improve. 

“It will have to come down eventually…I am just living in hope,” she said.