Siobhan English

Hi, Ciarán.

Thanks a million for taking my call.

Yeah, so we have a little farm estate in West Wicklow, five kilometres outside Dunlavin.

We converted it in 2019.

We wanted to diversify, get into agritourism, open up our farm to people, you know, want to learn about animals, want to learn how a working farm operates.

So we opened 2019, a little bit of bad timing with COVID, came in 2020, we had to close down.

But as it happened, we ended up taking a lot of essential workers for that year.

but I had nowhere else to go, you know?

And then we opened up again late 20, into 21.

And since then we've had upwards of 400 groups stay with us from all over the world.

It was thriving.

It was thriving.

We did very well last year.

You know, year on year we were getting, we meet customers, we do a lot of overflow for local hotels, we get in workers, we get a huge variety of people.

You know, a lot of overseas guests.

This year, the numbers are way down.

Way down for a variety of reasons.

One of them was just frustrated with this new legislation that's supposed to be coming into play on the 20th of May that hasn't happened, but word has got out.

And I think there's a lot of people across the globe that were getting nervous to book places for fear that the legislation would come in and we could be out of business.

Okay.