How important is agriculture to your business?

We have been making silos since the late 1960s, so agriculture is at our core, both directly through sales of silos and indirectly, supplying sheet metal components to agricultural machine manufacturers.

What is the mood with your customers/farmers currently?

Within the general manufacturing sector, things are very positive at the moment –underlying economic activity is good and well recovered from the last recession. Within the agricultural sector, there is a much more settled mood. We are seeing a lot of expansion in some sectors, eg poultry and dairy in particular.

How has the lifting of milk quotas affected your business?

We are seeing solid investment in the dairy sector. This has been a knock-on effect as it means farmers replace their silos with larger capacity models. In addition, we supply many of the animal feed mills and merchants and many of them have redeveloped their plants.

What is the biggest threat facing your business?

The biggest threat is Brexit – 40% of our turnover is to the UK. The uncertainty and effect that this has on our customers investment decisions is what affects us the most.

What is the biggest challenge facing your business?

In our region, there is a major shortage of high-quality fabrication welders and similar tradesmen. The lack of investment in apprenticeship programmes over the last few years is having an effect now and is only really starting to get resolved.

Where is the greatest opportunity?

Despite all the uncertainty, the UK is still a massive market and we’d be optimistic. We opened an office there last year.

What are you most concerned about?

We focus on managing the business in terms of the things we have control over. There are lots of things such as exchange rates, Brexit and the general economy which we have no control over, so while we would have concerns over these factors, there is not a lot we can do about them.

Is finance an issue?

Finance is always an issue. We have invested over €2m over the past two years and we plan to develop a new factory at our Ballinode site.

Sourcing finance is much easier than it was, indicating that things are normalising, but interest rates are still relatively high compared with other EU countries.

What support would you like from Government?

After Brexit, the UK will not be restricted to the same EU rules around providing company supports. This could place companies like ours at a serious competitive disadvantage.

We would like to see special support provided to border companies.

Title: Eamon McMeel, silo sales manager, McAree Engineering Works Ltd.

Location: Ballinode and Carrickroe, Co Monaghan.

Business sector: Sheet metal fabrication.

Annual turnover: €9m.

Number of employees: 102.

Exports: 40%.