BUSINESSES in Northern Ireland had to wait until the eleventh hour of Brexit negotiations to see how they would operate after January 1, 2021.

For Mannok Holdings, which operates mainly in Great Britain and Ireland markets, so far things have not been as bad they could be, but this is more down to the work the company have done since the Brexit result to prepare for the eventual day the UK left Europe.

However, their operations are still not as smooth as they used to be.

“Obviously, we have been looking at [Brexit] for the past four and a half years and the impact it might have on us,” said Mannok’s Chief Executive, Liam McCaffrey.

“Prior to Christmas, we set up new companies in the GB market so that we could distribute our products through those companies, and we are now in the process of switching all our customer accounts over to that.

“We have also implemented a software system which should allow the customs declarations to go through seamlessly, but that has not really happened yet, because the systems to deal with them with the HMRC have only just been put in place.

“It is fair to say we are beginning to experience some teething issues with those,” he said.

With the Brexit deal being left so late, in terms of the Northern Ireland Protocol, and the authorities’ post-Brexit systems were only available to Mannok from 2021, leaving the company with no time to test them to ensure that everything would flow smoothly.

Mr. McCaffrey said: “The fact that Brexit was so last-minute ... isn’t ideal, but we will work our way through. But there will be a number of weeks of disruption here, there is no doubt about that.

“We have put a lot of work into [Brexit preparations], and have a lot of good people on it, but we can’t do the work on both sides. I think, by the end of the first quarter, it should all be running smoothly and, hopefully, before that.”

He said: “A ‘hard Brexit’ and anything to do with a [physical] Border on the island of Ireland would have been a disaster.

“We have a quarry that passes through the Border; we have a lot of staff moving from either side of it, and a lot of internal flow of both raw material and finished goods between North and South because, effectively, the business grew up over the past 40 years when there was no economic border there.

“At least now we have certainty, in terms of moving forward. Over the past four and a half years, if you talked about expansion of growth, or went to talk to anybody about finance, the first question was ‘How will Brexit affect you’, and it was a question we couldn’t answer until Christmas Eve when a deal was struck,” said Mr. McCaffrey.

However, Mr. McCaffrey is yet to see any signs of the opportunities of Brexit that some have claimed are out there: “There is no sugar-coating it – for us, Brexit has been a drawback for the past four and a half years, in terms of uncertainty on the business.

“For the next period of time, there will be a lot of time spent trying to sort out the fact that this agreement came very late in the day, and the processes around it and to support it are late in being implemented, and that is causing extra cost and disruption for business.

“Certainly, we haven’t identified any opportunities out of [Brexit]. Maybe in time, we will have some benefit ... but at the minute we are just trying to sort out the day-to-day [business] from the mess that has been presented to us.”

Now that the separation of the UK from the EU has happened, it is time to move on, and that is one of the positives that the Mannok Chief Executive can see. However, he knows there is still work to do despite the agreement.

Mr. McCaffrey added: “I don’t think Brexit is good, but at least now we have reached a point where we can move forward on it.

“That has to be seen as a positive, given everything that has happened over the past number of years. Even though there is an agreement, there is still an awful lot of work to be done.”