When shoppers do venture back to city centres and shopping centres later this year, things are going to look and feel very different.
The Covid-19 pandemic has rapidly accelerated a move towards online shopping and any high street brand that was already flailing will have disappeared from Irish towns and cities, bringing with them the loss of thousands of Irish jobs.
Many of the absences will be British brands including the eleven Debenhams department stores on shopping streets from Dublin and Cork to Newbridge, Galway, Limerick, Tralee and Waterford.
Other stores that will be gone include Topshop, Topman, Dorothy Perkins, Wallis and Miss Selfridge.
A Mallow woman who has helped raise over €130,000 for the world s poorest people by organising annual street collections in the town for the last 46 years, has been honoured by the Irish humanitarian organisation Concern Worldwide.
Retired nurse Irene O Brien (70) has not missed a year since she began in 1974, when she returned from working for Concern in Bangladesh and the Blue Nuns in Rhodesia. Kathleen McCarthy had begun the collections the previous year and we are still collecting together, as part of a larger team of volunteers, she said. Even when I was pregnant and had the smallies with me we would run the fast from the caravan outside the church in the town, the mother-of-five recalled.