Malcolm Noonan newly elected Green Party TD for Carlow Kilkenny, having spent 16 years as a local councillor in Kilkenny.

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It was announced last week that Bewley’s Café on Grafton Street in Dublin won’t be reopening, the operators said that the lockdown, coupled with high rents, have pushed their business over the edge, and it’s no longer viable. That’s obviously bad news for the 110 staff that worked there.

Most of the comments broke down into two categories – nostalgia and protest. The first type was typified by Vivian Lambert, she said:

Such sad news about Bewleys of Grafton St. My great treat as a child was to go there for a glass of Jersey milk and a cherry bun with my Dad.

here were loads more in that vein, and I have to admit that I could probably have written my own, I have a dim childhood memory of discovering the existence of coffee when I went with my parents, just about big enough to see over the table when I was sitting on a bench there.

But, the second category of post was more political. The Green Party MEP Ciarán Cuffe tweeted

When #Bewleys was last under threat 16 years ago I called up landlord Johnny Ronan and asked could he help. "Business is business" was his reply. No change there it seem

There was much stronger criticism too, best represented by the People Before Profit official Twitter account’s tweet which said

We need decisive state action to force people like Ronan to slash his rents. The state should then move in and take a majority share of Bewley’s, to preserve jobs and enable the café to ride out the storm, as well as preserve a cultural symbol of Dublin life.

There were loads in that vein too, a lot of them critical, to say the very least, of Johnny Ronan. People Before Profit, as you heard, advocated the nationalisation of Bewley’s, other people made a variety of suggestions of market interventions the government could make to keep the café open.

These ranged from seizing Johnny Ronan’s property,