This article is from page 9 of the 2008-06-17 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 9 JPG
yesterday WeTLOD LMR MMA DM RETUO RY, impossible for small businesses to get off the ground in Ire- land today.
“This situation 1s really tightening up our margins and that means that there is very little left for reinvestment and all businesses like this need to be able to invest in order to Survive,’ he said.
“If we were just starting now, there is nO way we would be able to get going. The entry cost for new busi- nesses is just too high. Smaller busi- nesses like ours are just not getting off the ground.”
Despite healthy sales, the Burren Smokehouse has already been forced to stop exporting to America because of high production costs and volatile exchange rates.
“It could get to the stage that we
will have to stop exporting to main- land Europe because the price would just be too high. It hasn’t got to that stage yet but it could do,” he contin- ued.
“There is no sign of the price of oil going down and if it goes up fur- ther, it will impact even more. You’d
wonder in the future, with the increasing price of oul, will it be competitive to ship abroad at all. “There is a real feeling of uncer- tainty in the mar- ket. Nobody seems to know what is coming next but
everyone _ thinks that it is not going to be good.
“The cost of dis- tributing the prod- uct has gone up and
that is having a serious impact on the business. The cost of the raw mate- rial has gone up and the cost of ship- ping the product has also gone up.
“We ship all over Ireland and into Europe. We used to ship into Ameri- ca but, because of economic factors, we have had to stop doing that.”