New Covid travel protocols needed for business travellers, says Mullingar firm

A Mullingar manufacturing firm which in recent months has lost 10 man weeks due to the mandatory 14-day quarantine following trips abroad has called for the government to implement a more streamlined protocol for business travellers.

Some of Pem Automation’s biggest clients are based in Germany. As the country is currently not on Ireland’s green list, staff who have travelled there have had to stay at home for two weeks following their return – despite the fact that their employers provided two private Covid-19 tests for them within the first four days of their return, all of which have been negative.

The firm, which employs 22 people, closed for six weeks at the start of the Covid-19 crisis and it still playing catch-up, managing director Heinz O’Connor says. The current travel restrictions and the 14-day quarantine after trips to countries not on the green list have not helped.

“We could not deliver tooling that was ready in our factory to be delivered. We couldn’t install tooling that had been delivered,” said Mr O’Connor. “We couldn’t support existing product that's in production abroad and I can’t go and sit down with customers and generate the business that I would have generated last year.

“We are doing that as much as possible remotely, but sales are really done face to face and being in contact with your customer. I would have been abroad every two weeks last year. I haven’t lost complete contact with customers, but you can feel it ebbing away.

“We are a manufacturing company and 50 per cent of what we manufacture is exported. Most of what we export is going to Germany. We have machines that we are in the middle of designing now that will be going into the States in the new year, so that’s an issue. We also have some tooling and machinery and automation that goes into Hungary, which is at the moment, thankfully, not an issue.

“The people who have to travel are the people who do the installation. You can’t do installation from home. We have a huge variety of skillsets here. The people who are designing and the people who are project managing can work from home but the people who are screwing the nuts and bolts onto a machine or bolting it to the floor, or carrying out training on site, they can not work from home. They are people who travel. Last year we would have had one or two people continuously out of the country doing that work.”

When the firm reopened in April, Mr O’Connor says that staff were initially anxious about travelling abroad, but their concerns were alleviated when the firm contracted a private company to test them twice when they returned - once on their arrival, and a second time four days later.

Pem Automation has been in touch with local ministers of state Peter Burke and Robert Troy in an attempt to get the company’s protocol approved, but to no avail.

Mr O’Connor added that he does not understand why the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, was able to attend the Dáil on returning from the EU Summit of leaders in July after receiving a negative Covid-19 test result, while businesses such as his own which depend on exports are forced to operate at limited capacity because of the quarantine rules.

“What we have been trying to do for the last two months is get an acceptance that this is a logical protocol,” he said. “People all over the country need to carry out business travel to keep this country afloat and keep businesses going.

“I have not gone abroad on holiday this year. My family have not gone abroad. I can understand why that should be avoided. I’m talking about business travel. There should be a separate protocol for that.”