“Did you know the Irish invented duty free shops?” asked an Irish acquaintance a day or two ago.
Now it was April Fools’ Day, suggesting that perhaps I was having my leg gently pulled. On the other hand, “don’t forget the ‘duty frees’!” has long meant get your quota of cheap booze when you travel, so, given the Irish desire to pack away the hard stuff, it seemed quite reasonable that the they might well have invented the idea. Before I get a whole pile of complaints about insulting the Irish, let me point out that a lot of my great-great-grandparents left Ireland in the 1840’s famines. It was only a matter of luck and great good fortune, at least from my perspective, that they caught boats going east to Liverpool and Glasgow, rather than west to New York.
Anyway, I tried to do a bit of checking. The manager of the DFS in Dubai is Irish; the manager here in Beirut is Irish and the connection is there in others around the globe too. One exception is London’s Heathrow. Although the airport is owned by the Spanish, the DFS is owned by an Italian company – QuickGrill – a name that doesn’t really capitalise on any aspect I recognise of the cuisine that country is famous for.
“Famous for” well, let’s strain links a bit and connect to the “Famous Five”, a series of children’s adventure books written by that most English of authoresses – Enid Blyton. At least one of her series (Mallory Towers) is being added to many years after her death – but by a German.
In that spirit of globalisation, the British Company Gauchos which concentrates on Argentine specialities has opened its first restaurant outside the UK here in Beirut and have kindly offered to host the British Lebanese Business Group’s next meeting.
Whoops that wasn’t so much of a digression more heading off in a completely different direction; so, let’s get back to the subject in hand. It seems that there is indeed a very significant Irish business owning and/or operating DFSs all over the globe, so hats off to the Irish for finding a way round customs duties. Who invented them by the way? (Customs duties, not the Irish.) Well it seems that that the Romans did and the Boadicea uprising was at least partly inspired by the abuses of corrupt Roman tax collectors.
There is a sense of irony then that nearly two thousand years after an English revolt against Roman customs duties, the aforementioned Heathrow duty free is owned by Italians, albeit Milanese.
