Why don't Irish pubs sell snacks?

The pint of Guinness is really good in there imo.

Never understood the fuss on the sandwich, though I prefer one of them to the "beef dripping chips", you see on pub menus nowadays.

I would think €1000 a week is a sideline. You may need to hire extra staff for serving and cleaning, even 3-4 hours a day by a wage cost of say €15 per hour would well eat into that €1000-and NO PUN INTENDED!

Exactly, even doing €1,000 a week on very basic offering of sandwiches/ pies (we don't really eat pies here) and a gross margin of 65%, it would most likely be loss making

You did I will admit. I am coming from a rural, local pub perspective. Generally one staff on. If anyway busy, one staff is not enough to serve drink and do minimal food preparation and service and clearing of tables. Again I will note there are posters from large urban areas and their pubs (generally quite large) and those of us in rural Ireland.

I'd say the regulations have a lot to do with it. A pub near me used to do a good trade at lunchtime, selling soup and fresh sandwiches etc. They decided to stop doing them after a visit from some sort of inspector. The choice was to either spend thousands upgrading the existing kitchen or stop doing the lunches they had been selling. They started doing a cut down version of lunch for a while (might have just been the soup) but then they stopped.

It's a real shame. It'd be lovely to have the option of going to a tapas bar or similar. I guess bar owners aren't willing to take a chance on it, knowing how much it'll cost to get going. There's no guarantee it's a viable business model either.

Probably regulation. Parents friends had a restaurant said the food safety regulations and checks were rigorous. Glad of this over all as hopefully can be assured that we are getting safe food when we eat out. Reminded of the recent case in Paris of botulism over canned / preserved sardines. Can never be too careful around food safety I think,

The blaming of the HSE thing is horsesht. Lots of "probably" and "I'de say" going on.

Loads of pubs with little or no kitchens are still doing toasties.

The Guinness everywhere is average. This "good/bad Guinness pub" idea is one of the great bullsht myths of the Irish pub.

And here we have the real reason. Most Irish publicans want to keep it simple and are adverse to change. It's gotten a lot better but trying to convince them to stock an unusual beer or a bag of something not tayto/bacon fries was mind numbing.

The whole point of the OP. The option of cheap snacks, not just bags of stale King crisps, peanuts or a meal costing about a tenner.

If publicans are too lazy or unimaginative to diversify out of the booze only model, they will find themselves pulling down the shutters.

A lot of pubs here just want to fill people up with drink, crank up the way too loud music to stop the talk and increase drinking and throw them out at the end of the night, bar the doors and let them be someone else's problem. The lack of and cost of non alcoholic drinks is another bugbear.

There's a few places in Dublin doing similar. The 108 in Rathgar. The Jar on Wexford St. It's win-win, in fairness.

Have seen this done, it's a very good compromise, a great way of keeping both businesses open by working together.

Plenty of pubs getting along just fine with just drink, music, sport etc. and no food.

I know of places that went into food and the drinks trade disappeared. Still doing fine with the food too though.