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Displaying items by tag: Brexit & Covid19

Enterprise Ireland-backed companies which won new contracts declined by 12% in the first half of 2020 due to Covid-19 with this year described as "very challenging" for Irish exporters.

As the Irish Examiner writes, the state agency responsible for helping Irish companies export to international markets said Covid-19 has had a negative impact on order books and international market confidence. Approximately 1,000 client companies are impacted by the pandemic with 75% reporting that their exports have been impacted by Covid-19 and more than half saw a negative impact on cash flow. 300 companies are very exposed with high levels of exports to the UK.

The agency has warned that challenging conditions will continue to impact exporters who will face the dual challenge of both dealing with the Covid-19 impact on their business and also the impending January 1st Brexit deadline.

For 2019, Enterprise Ireland reported strong levels of export performance by its client companies, up 8% to €25.6bn. Last year, exports to the Eurozone region saw record growth of 15% to €5.6bn, while exports to North America increased by 16% to €4.7bn last year.

More on the export sector here

Published in Ports & Shipping

Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC) is one of Europe's biggest yacht racing clubs. It has almost sixteen hundred elected members. It presents more than 100 perpetual trophies each season some dating back to 1884. It provides weekly racing for upwards of 360 yachts, ranging from ocean-going forty footers to small dinghies for juniors.

Undaunted by austerity and encircling gloom, Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC), supported by an institutional memory of one hundred and twenty-nine years of racing and having survived two world wars, a civil war and not to mention the nineteen-thirties depression, it continues to present its racing programme year after year as a cherished Dublin sporting institution.

The DBSC formula that, over the years, has worked very well for Dun Laoghaire sailors. As ever DBSC start racing at the end of April and finish at the end of September. The current commodore is Eddie Totterdell of the National Yacht Club.

The character of racing remains broadly the same in recent times, with starts and finishes at Club's two committee boats, one of them DBSC's new flagship, the Freebird. The latter will also service dinghy racing on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Having more in the way of creature comfort than the John T. Biggs, it has enabled the dinghy sub-committee to attract a regular team to manage its races, very much as happened in the case of MacLir and more recently with the Spirit of the Irish. The expectation is that this will raise the quality of dinghy race management, which, operating as it did on a class quota system, had tended to suffer from a lack of continuity.