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Mags Downey-Martin goes about her business with a quiet efficiency but don’t let that fool you into thinking she isn’t a busy lady. Chief executive officer of Ballina Chamber of Commerce, she has a finger on the pulse of everything that’s happening in her beloved native town but brings an air of calmness to a room that can only permeate to those around her.
Fresh from a hectic 2023, which saw the town mark 300 years since its formal establishment, Mags is already deep into planning for 2024, including marking the 60th anniversary of the Ballina Salmon Festival.
We meet in the first week of January when Mags is supposed to be off work, but true to form, she is in the office “doing an hour or two!”
Mags, thanks for talking to me. Tell me a little about your background.
I’m a proud Ballina woman. Ballina is my club and I’m very proud of it. Currently, I am CEO of the Ballina Chamber of Commerce. But to take a step back, my background is in hospitality and tourism. So I went to college in the North at the University of Ulster. I have a business degree, primarily in tourism and hospitality.
But in between, you did something very interesting, didn’t you?
I took two years out and I worked on the boats. So I lived in Scotland for two and a half years. And I was in the Navy – the Merchant Navy. I did a Higher National Diploma, took two years out, as opposed to going straight on finishing a degree, and went to Scotland. I was in the Merchant Navy at that time between the ages of 21 and 23, but I did keep my degree place. It was only meant to be a summer job, but I ended up going and living in Scotland for two and a half years and then being offered a position in Liverpool. But I said no because if I didn’t finish my degree then I was never going to do that. So then I upped sticks and went back and finished my degree in Magee in Derry in 1999.
Then you ended up at the BBC – tell us about that?
I worked for four years with the BBC in information and research and had a bit of experience doing a bit of running and stuff for the shows. I lived in Belfast for nearly ten years.
Then fast forward to 2006, 2007, I had met my now husband by then, and we had one child. We flipped a coin and we moved back to Mayo. After I finished in the BBC, I worked for two years in the Grand Opera House in Belfast, which was amazing – front of house.
So you came back to Ballina in 2007 – what did you do then?
We opened a business in Ballina, a coffee shop. That lasted about three years. We were unlucky with the timing – Ireland was heading into a very tough time. We were young and naive and we had a bit of money from the sale of our house in the North. We tried it and nothing ventured, nothing gained. Thankfully, we weren’t left homeless. I had a very good Mum and Dad who supported us. And when that happened, my husband Paul was able to get work for Costa Coffee, so he started working as a manager with them. I was working for the Downhill House Hotel at the time, in sales and marketing, an amazing experience.
I was very privileged, I worked under two brilliant women – Mrs B, who was Mrs Moylett, and Kay Devine, who worked under Mrs B as a young woman, had built up her career and had learned all the tricks of the trade that Mrs B had, who then passed it on to me. We used to do trade shows. We were off trekking around the country, up to Belfast, down to Cork – all over the place, selling Ballina, selling Mayo, selling North Mayo, because nobody was selling Ballina at that time.
So what was your next move Mags?
In 2012, I started working for the Chamber of Commerce because the Tourist Office was going to be closed in Ballina, which would have been a travesty. So the Chamber at the time was managed by Sandra Gribben, a brilliant person and a brilliant CEO, and it was decided that the Chamber, would run it. So the opportunity came to run a Community Tourist Office and they needed someone to manage that. She knew I was off on maternity leave and I wasn’t going to go back to the hotel at that time, because I wanted fewer hours. But Sandra allowed me to come and work 20 hours a week and run the tourist office.
Between the jigs and the reels, the opportunity then came to take over another building, a larger building that had been CPO’ed by the council, which is the building that we’re now in, in Lower Pearse Street. So it’s owned by the council and the Chamber manages it. And it was bringing all the entities that were promoting and selling Ballina together, which makes total sense. That happened in 2016. And then the CEO position came after that. We then took over running the Salmon Festival in 2019 because there was a chance that the Salmon Festival wouldn’t have happened that year and a decision was made that we couldn’t let the business community down, because it’s fundamentally – while it is an amazing festival and 60 years in 2024 – the real benefactors financially are the business community, and then everybody else has the spin-off, civic pride and everything else. So it made sense in a way that the Chamber would start to run it, and we had a bit of the manpower and the support that was needed, and so we grabbed it in 2019 and ran with it, and, of course, had it all planned for 2020 and then Covid hit. But, for Ballina, some would look at our town and say, we probably did quite well during that time, from an introspective sense, looking at the town, different organisations kind of looked at what their capacity was to support the town. We had some new organisations that grew within that period and have done amazing work for the town.
So as we are coming out of Covid, the idea for Ballina 2023 is mentioned?
That was mooted by Cllr Jarlath Munnelly at one of the Ballina Municipal District Council meetings. He put it forward as a motion, and, of course, I was 100% behind it because it gave us an excuse, if nothing else, to run with this. And I thought this is something that we can really put our shoulder to the wheel with and define the town. The steering committee was made up of many facets of the town as well, which worked very, very well for us.
We are conducting a survey on Ballina 2023, and we’d look for it to be as honest and as open. It’s private and confidential. You don’t need to leave your name or anything and that would mean we would have a very honest reflection on what the last two years have been for the town, having given so much energy and effort and financial support and everything else to it, that it did reflect the community because that’s what it was all about.
It was hard going too I’d imagine?
A lot of hard work, but it wasn’t just me. And I would never take the credit for the whole thing, because it was many, many streams and cogs and silos. But yet, every Monday, we had a meeting with Lisa Hallinan, our amazing project leader, an amazing person. I cannot praise her enough for putting up with us and delivering on every bit of crazy dream that we might have had. We have to thank all the committee members, but everyone had a contribution and it was never any one person, even though realistically the project manager really drove home those things and made sure all our ambitions were delivered and more.
This area of developing the community and helping businesses – it’s something you have a distinct passion for?
Originally, I wouldn’t have thought I’d go down that path. But I do believe, what’s meant for you won’t go by you. And my own father [PJ Downey] was a local councillor for so many years – we are a people who really do love our town and love our community. And we have children who are growing up in the town and we want the best for them. We want the town to develop because it’s a great town and has so many great people.
A tough question in January, but what’s the plan for 2024?
In 2023 we did so much – not to say we have to better what we’ve done, we just need to build on it from a Chamber’s perspective. We’re having a six-week workshop weekly get-together – lunchtime learning sessions that we’ve launched. That began this week. So every Monday, we are doing something to support the businesses. It’s a hard time, we’re going into. There have been changes in various legislation for employers now. It’s a hard time for any person to be in business again. Our networking events will start up again in February. We’re planning a big event for International Women’s Day. We’ll be having a new President coming at the end of February. The amazing Tracey Glacken has come to the end of her two-year term. And then, of course, we have the amazing Ballina Salmon Festival Anniversary coming in July – from July 7th to 14th.
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