It's a bitterly cold day just before Christmas when I meet John Atherton. The McDonald's Ireland chief executive has suggested a meeting in its restaurant in Stillorgan shopping centre, in south Dublin, one of the first it had in the country. It's thankfully close by and with only a few customers about early in the morning, it's the perfect location for him to tell me what the company has been up to in Ireland in the last few years.

The Stillorgan restaurant has recently undergone a revamp. It's bright, has plenty of comfortable booths and appeals to all types of customers, existing and new, Atherton said. Whether you want a breakfast (they are open early these days, he said), want to slip in for a coffee and surf the web or have a lunch, the new look should entice everyone in. About €17m has been spent by McDonald's refurbishing its restaurants here in the last few years, with about two-thirds of them having undergone a refit; the rest will follow by the end of 2012.

What's bothering Atherton is that the company's plan of opening four new outlets a year – creating hundreds of jobs – is falling behind plan. For that you can blame the economy. Turnover in 2009 was €200m, roughly unchanged on the previous year despite more customers. Another million people have passed through the Golden Arches this year, but Atherton said they were demanding cheaper prices. (The Eurosaver menu, launched back in 2002, is proving popular at the moment.)

"You've got to fight for every customer. We've got a million new customers this year. Some of them are new, some are [coming in] because we're open longer but they are spending less when they are here. We've had to serve a million more people but to take the same amount of money. That tells you how tough it is out there. I would be much happier in a booming environment with rising footfall and everybody up 10%," he said.

"When there is bad news on the radio, the next day people don't spend. People say: 'I'm not going to have that cappuccino' or 'I'm not going to eat out for lunch, I'll make sandwiches at home.' We need confidence to return and get people spending again."

One of the brights spots is that McDonald's is reaping some rewards from opening early and adding items to its breakfast menu. It now sells more than three million cups of coffee and after some initial hiccups with quality, believes it can now compete with coffee chains. In the next week, customers will be able to order espressos, a sign Atherton said, that McDonald's is serious about quality.

"[Breakfast sales are] a growing part of the business. We've put a bit more investment in there and expanded the range of breakfast items. We've a bespoke breakfast menu until half 10... it's what you would want the first thing in the morning and its different than what you would expect from us," he said.

"People used to come in at breakfast and thought our coffee wasn't good. We've fixed that. It is all about quality and we can now stand by it. Come in and have an espresso... it is as good as anywhere else and it challenges people's perceptions about us."

Not meeting expansion targets, however, has been frustrating, Atherton said. This hasn't been due to a lack of suitable locations or even failure to secure planning permission, but instead it's down to the problems affecting the developers McDonald's is working with.

"The big frustration this year is we haven't opened the restaurants we wanted to and haven't created the 250 jobs we wanted to. We have the sites, we have planning, but the developers got called into Nama and can't get financing to build out the whole site. We have to go in with developers and go in with other retailers and that is the knock-on effect of Nama.

"It is slowing down businesses like us from opening up. We have a degree of confidence that next year we will open the four we want to."

One frustration that's about to end for McDonald's is the days of upwards-only rent reviews. It won't help the company's existing franchisees but it should cut the costs of new restaurants.

"I hate seeing closing-down signs and shopping units that aren't let and part of it is because you have upwards-only rents. Upwards-only is fine if the economy is going up. It's not an issue if business is growing but the reality is that we are not really growing so why should that cost go up?" he said.

One cost that won't be coming down is staff pay. While the government has introduced cuts to the minimum wage Atherton said his staff were paid much more per hour, and there would be no cuts to ensure staff stay with McDonald's.

"I'm not sure businesses will make the cut. I need a motivated workforce and I think you'd be mad to cut wages. We employ 3,600 people and over 3,000 are on hourly pay and I need them to smile. I'm not willing to demotivate staff."

With the year coming to a close when we meet, Atherton said he hoped 2010 would be the last year of tough trading for both McDonald's and its rivals.

"We'll be flat again [in turnover]. It's the story I've been saying for the last two years now but it belies the amount of effort you have to put in to do that. I'd be happy for our competitors and me to be up. It gives me no delight to say we are flat."

The Atherton CV

Born: Barnsley, England

Age: 50

Position: Managing director of McDonald's Ireland. Has spent his career with the company, starting out as a trainee manager in Birmingham

Education: Geography degree from Birmingham University