Guitars have been a life-long obsession for Alistair Hay, a young Donegal-based entrepreneur.
He has been "fascinated by guitars and guitar music" since the age of six, he admits, "but I never went to the trouble of learning how to play them properly".
Instead, from a rural outpost a few miles outside Lifford, he runs a small enterprise, Emerald Guitars, which makes the instrument for buyers in Ireland and the US.
The company's product is no ordinary guitar, however. It is made from carbon fibre in a single mould, unlike traditional wood guitars in which different pieces are joined together.
The result, Mr Hay claims, is a sturdier guitar less likely to suffer damage on the road or to encounter problems such as condensation.
Artists including the Grammy-award winner Steve Vai and Donegal's own Mickey Harte have been convinced and are among a growing band playing Emerald guitars.
Enterprise Ireland has also been convinced and points to the company as an example of the type of innovative, sustainable operation needed to create lasting jobs to replace those being lost in the textiles industry. But replacing jobs on the scale of those that have disappeared will not be easy. Emerald currently employs five people, but hopes to double that in the near future.
Mr Hay says Enterprise Ireland has come up with an "excellent package", but it took him several years to convince State agencies or banks that he had a viable proposition.
About €400,000 has already been invested in the enterprise, he says, money he raised through a fibreglass business he set up purely as a platform for his guitar company.
Mr David Gray, who runs Cora Tine Teo, an Údarás na Gaeltachta-backed enterprise in Falcarragh, believes a culture change is needed if more small businesses are to flourish. His company enables businesses handling food, such as supermarkets, to monitor storage conditions via the internet. "We ought to do more to support risk-takers. In the US they say if you haven't been bankrupt twice by the time you are 30, then you aren't really trying," he says.
