Relocation special: Giant steps forward

You don’t need to be an historian to know that Northern Ireland has a troubled past. On the political front, the region has recently been marred by bitter disputes between
the republican and loyalist sections of the population. The business misadventures, meanwhile, have gleaned a far higher profile than the successes – with not only the Titanic, but also the ill-fated DeLorean DMC-12 springing into being on the shores of the river Lagan.

But the past ten years have represented a period of immense change for Northern Ireland, politically and economically. The worst of the sectarian troubles are gradually fading to distant memory, while some of the additional issues posed by the period are steadily being resolved.

‘We are emerging from 30 years of violence, the result of which is an economy two-thirds dominated by the public sector,’ Brendan Mullan, chief executive of Investment Belfast confirms.

Increased stability has triggered a rush of inward investment – up 45 per cent in recent years – to address this sector imbalance. At the same time, the region, like the remainder of the UK’s traditionally industrial heartlands, is also being forced to adapt to the realities of the 21st century.

‘At the turn of the century our economy was very much based on industries like shipbuilding and textiles, but with globalisation we can no longer compete in terms of cost in those areas,’ says Mullan, ‘and the reality is that we now have to focus on things like our knowledge base instead.’ That’s a challenge currently being embraced
by Northern Ireland’s 1.69 million inhabitants – 700,000 of whom live in or around Belfast.

Sector focus
‘There are five main sectors we’re focusing on these days,’ states John Thompson from regional economic development agency Invest Northern Ireland, ‘namely, aerospace, food, information and communication technologies (ICT), biotech and life sciences.’
Success, in terms of attracting inward investment, has been particularly prevalent in the ICT sector, with a legion of household names establishing offices in the region.
Late 2004, for instance, saw US financial services giant Citigroup establish a £65 million technology centre of excellence at Belfast’s Northern Ireland Science Park, a site overlooking the Titanic’s old dry dock. SAP and Halifax have also built significant local software development centres in recent times.

This success in luring high-profile names to the area owes much to the efforts of Invest Northern Ireland in targeting specific sectors. John Anderson, a professor at the University of Ulster and the serial entrepreneur who helped develop the world’s first genuinely portable heart defibrillator, says there’s more to this trend than mere marketing. ‘In terms of skill sets and research there are three or four areas we really are world class at, principally nanotech, ICT and software development.’

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