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MMG Ocean making waves with innovative gangways

MMG Ocean founder Martin McGuinness has had a lifelong love of the ocean which has taken him on a business voyage he could barely have imagined when growing up on Ireland’s north-west Atlantic coast. His company’s specially designed gangways for Fishing boats and workboats have helped the business grow into international markets, and MMG Ocean now has partnerships across the Shetland and Orkney Islands, where Enterprise Ireland have been assisting them. 

“I always bring up history and how the Vikings have done things in this way for hundreds and hundreds of years, travelling abroad and bringing back new ideas, especially in the maritime area,” Martin explains. “It’s not out of our reach to say that we can more than hold our own with our Nordic friends, and the next step is to ask where do we fit best with them, and what can we bring to the to the collaboration.”

As a boy, Martin would stare out the classroom window of his school in Killybegs, longing to be out on the sea, rather than stuck indoors. When his education was completed, he wasted no time in making his dream of a life on the waves come true. 

“I started a welding fabrication apprenticeship in Mooney Boats shipyard in Killybegs as a teenager, and that led to me working on fishing boats more or less from all over the world,Martin recalls. “Life started for me then, because I was somewhere where I was comfortable, I was somewhere where I could progress, where I could learn. I just loved the boats and the ocean.”

Using the experience from his apprenticeship and his work at sea, Martin started his own business in 2005, servicing the many fishing boats that docked in Killybegs, Ireland’s premier fishing port. Over the course of almost 15 years he built a thriving business, but it was in 2019 that a research and development project caused a change of course that moved MMG on to the next level. 

“Up until 2019 we were primarily a service business, and then we went into a product development project to develop a new, safer way for embarking and disembarking work boats like fishing vessels, aquaculture vessels, and boats used for oil, gas and renewable energy,” Martin says. “The mission was to develop a gangway that would always function, no matter the size of the vessel, the height of the quay or the tide.”

That simple idea proved to be very powerful. While ports in Norway do not have the same differences in water levels between the tides, Ireland’s Atlantic coast can see swings of several metres through the day, offering perfect conditions to develop a robust solution that can be deployed almost anywhere in the world.

“We developed a novel technology, a hinging system that ensures the gangway still functions when the vessel was below the quay wall. It started as a manual system and it’s now deployed by automated technology,” Martin says. 

The gangways supplied by MMG Ocean address one of the major safety concerns for all workboats – getting the crew safely on and off the vessels, even in the most challenging conditions, and with the ocean linking his business and his customers, the Donegal man finds that he has a lot in common with his contacts in the Scottish islands and in Norway. 

“I do believe it's because we're all coastal communities, and I believe we understand the necessity for safety. The ocean is like an animal in its own right – you don't know what it's going to throw at you at any given time,” he says. 

MMG Ocean supplies a range of different gangways for pier-to-vessel and vessel-to-vessel use, and it also works with clients to develop solutions tailored to their specific needs. 

The Donegal man is proud to be able to use graduates from the local Atlantic Technology University (ATU), as well as locally trained fabricators and welders from the Donegal Educational Training Board (ETB) who all play a vital role in designing and developing the products in their portfolio. 

“We've got the ATU, which covers the whole of the west of Ireland and has a campus in Killybegs, so we have great access to talented young graduates,” Martin says. “In early stage product development, we're big believers in getting everybody around the table and putting on the coffee machine and making it happen. We do have some remote work, but nothing beats putting a problem up on a whiteboard and getting everyone around to get their input about how to go about solving it.”

Martin and his team feel they have been strongly supported by Enterprise Ireland as they made the move from being a service business into being an innovator in their field. 

“Back to 2018, 2019 when we started product development, they provided us with innovation support funds, and that helped us with product development, market research, getting our intellectual property sorted out, and then when we moved to the market, they assisted with new market support to help us break into Norway and the UK,” he says. “I don’t think as a company we could have done it without them.”

MMG Ocean has already enjoyed great success, and Martin is looking forward to growing the business even further from their base in Killybegs, the fishing village that has been his home, no matter where the waves took him. 

“We are active all over the world, but County Donegal plays a part in everything we do,” Martin says. 

“Collaboration is key to our future, and we see our partnership with Ocean Kinetics based in Shetland as the foundation to sustain and build on the marine skills sets in Ireland, being utilised in Scotland, Norway, Denmark, which are a similar size to ourselves, with similar proud maritime traditions. These connections and collaborations have been happening for years, and we feel that’s where our future lies.”

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