THE Skibbereen furniture factory O’Donnell Designs has announced it is to close with the loss of 20 jobs.

Market collapse has been blamed for the decision to cease trading, according to the company founder Jim O’Donnell.

He explained: ‘We completed a job in Killarney at the end of April and we had another job lined up to start immediately in Cork Harbour.

‘But we got a phone call from the hotel manager saying they had decided not to go ahead with the job because a lot of events had been cancelled as a result of fluctuations in the American market.

‘We couldn’t pick up more work and we ran out of cash,’ Jim added. ‘We have had some tough years. We have had Brexit, the war in Ukraine, and we have had the Covid lockdown but we managed to come through them.

‘We started to make good inroads in 2025. We made a small bit of profit. And the first three months were good but then our market collapsed.

‘Ten years ago, our main market for hotel furniture was the greater London area. 80% of what we produced went into London. That collapsed with Brexit so we were thrown back on the Irish market.’

‘To be perfectly honest the Irish market is difficult, almost impossible. We found it very hard to make a margin or to hold a margin.

‘We were managing after cutting back very severely. We had to let people in the UK go.’

Jim explained that the first contract fell through and another contract we were negotiating in Dublin fell through. Then we were chasing another contract in the UK with an established customer but that was postponed. It was a case of too little too late.’

According to Jim, three or four of the company’s workers will pivot into the West Cork Film Studios that the O’Donnell family established in a building next door, and the others will get redundancy.

On a more positive note, he said the West Cork Film Studios will, in a calendar year from October to October, will have sent five film productions, all with positive feedback, and which is estimated to account for a €30m spend in the West Cork economy.