The management committee of the Vintners' Federation of Ireland (VFI) will meet today in Dublin to discuss, among other things, the breakaway group of publicans in Cork who have decided to go their own way with the Cork City Vintners' Association (CCVA).
Officially the VFI is making light of the new organisation but senior members are not so sure. These are fraught times for publicans. Relations with the Government are strained on the issue of price controls and deregulation of the industry could be looming.
"This is a difficult climate for us just now. Unity, not disunity, is what we need," said a Cork publican, who is not part of the CCVA. "If the best interests of the federation and the publicans themselves are to be upheld, we should all be singing from the same hymn sheet."
Mr Tadg O'Sullivan, chief executive of the VFI, said that while no organisation liked to see members falling away, the Cork publicans in the new group were entitled to go their own way if they wished. The VFI had 1,000 members in Cork city and county, and it was unlikely all of them would agree on everything all of the time.
Today's meeting of the management committee was a scheduled one and not convened specially to discuss the CCVA, Mr O'Sullivan said.
In fact, according to Mr Ger Kiely, a city-centre publican who will be chairman of the new organisation, a growing number of vintners in Cork has become disillusioned with the manner in which they are being represented by the VFI. For two years, he said, a number of Cork publicans had been trying unsuccessfully to have the VFI locally convene a meeting on Cork issues.
The CCVA, he added, no longer felt the Cork branch of the VFI was representative of members' needs or responsive to their demands.
"We don't wish to get into name-calling, but the feeling among our 50-plus membership at present is that we had been left out in the cold and the time had come to form our own representative body," Mr Kiely said.
Curiously, the new vintners' group seems to be going about matters somewhat prematurely. In its initial documentation to members, Mr Kieran Nestor, another Cork publican, is listed as vice-chairman. This came as news to Mr Nestor when he was contacted. The signature on the document was not his, he said, and neither had he agreed to take up any executive office, although, broadly speaking, he was in sympathy with the aims of the CCVA.
How could this have happened? "Probably overenthusiasm," Mr Kiely said, adding, "It shouldn't have happened. Mr Nestor was contacted and it was expected he would take up the position. I think his agreement was incorrectly taken for granted."