export

Mon

8°C | 2°C

'You know the timber bit inside the loo roll?

well you take two of those and stick them together and cover them in tin foil,then you sing the weather song and go to the window and see if it is sunny, snowy or rainy.

Then Miss writes it on the board.'

My 5 yr old has the cherished job of 'weather reader' today and I doubt she is going to report

blue skies and sun, which is the official forcast as above, we are still in the tail end of the storm. For example on Saturday morning a 8ft wall built for my son to play hurling against and to try and 

tempt him away from the windows (they never lost their appeal) blew down.

Symbolic?

Everyone is talking about export. We have to develop the export market to survive.
The stone factory where I used to work, Irish Natural Stone Products, is now just ticking over
making the odd Celtic Cross memorial.The 300k water jet stone saw, the brand new tile plant, and all the other large equipment
that churned out window sills and flooring for the building boom sit idle.
My ex-boss came to lunch yesterday. 
He is going to China to try and secure a contract flooring a huge new train station.

We wish him good fortune.

One company that has excelled in export is C and F tooling, established in Athenry in 1989

to design and manufacture jigs and press tools. It recently expanded into the green energy market,

proving that even the weather has some potential for export.Turnover in 2007 reached $100,000,000.
Last January I was skiing in Czech and we passed the frozen, barren, windswept region

where my old friend Ella Coffey, working for C and F, was sent to procure a site,
build a factory and set up the Czech division of C and F.
A single woman attempting such a feat in a country still entraped
by the remnants of communist bureaucracy and not knowing the language was laughed at.
Nobody is laughing now. With nothing more than a terrier like determination she purchased 
a 19 acre site, got the 200,000 sq ft factory built and is managing it,
flying back to Ireland every weekend where I met her on the flight back to Dublin.
This is the fighting spirit that we cannot afford to lose.