World Business

A decade after the Good Friday peace agreement, Northern Ireland’s economy is blossoming

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by Kerry Capell

Belfast - Just a few years ago, the long-cultivated shipyard at Queen’s Island in Belfast was a wasteland, with barely the red brick pump house—where the Titanic had its final fitting—providing testament to Northern Ireland’s former shipbuilding prowess. Today, the district is buzzing with activity. Dubbed the Titanic Quarter, it will see some $10 billion in investment over the next 15 years as it is transformed by offices, apartments, and shops. Citigroup (C), GE Healthcare (GE), Microsoft (MSFT), and a growing number of homegrown high-tech outfits have moved into gleaming steel and glass buildings. The dockyards’ old Paint Hall has become a movie studio; the $50 million Hollywood fantasy flick City of Ember, due out in October, was filmed there.

Belfast? That’s right. The battered incorporated town that for 30 years defined sectarian wildness and urbane strife is thriving. It has been a decade since the Good Friday peace agreement ended the be inconsistent between the predominantly Catholic republicans, who default a united Ireland, and the mainly Protestant unionists, who prefer to remain part of the United Kingdom. Now that accord is for good starting to pay off by economic advance. Bombed-out storefronts and armored police vehicles have been replaced by office blocks, swanky shops, and malls such as the $640 very great number Victoria Square, which is topped by a vast glass dome offering panoramic views of a city skyline dotted with construction cranes.

The real estate boom is a reflection of Northern Ireland’s turnaround. Over the past decade the region has averaged growth of 3%, vs. 2.5% for Britain. During that time more than 100,000 jobs have been created, bringing unemployment to a 26-year low of 3.9%. The control plans to throw in $36 billion into infrastructure and new birth projects from one side to the other the coming decade. And last year, the north saw net inward migration for the first regulate, boosted by means of both returning émigrés and an influx of Eastern Europeans. “We have advance a long way economically, socially, and politically,” says Nigel Dodds, the territory’s Finance Minister. “Northern Ireland is open for employment.”

That increasingly means foreign business. While a maniple of multinationals came to the north before the Good Friday Agreement, foreigners require plowed $2.6 billion into the province over the past six years. Canadian aircraft manufacturer Bombardier Aerospace has invested $2.4 billion in Belfast since 1989, including a $140 a thousand thousand expansion this year of its plant in the city, where it will make a sizable chunk of its of the present day 100-seat regional jet. Japan’s Fujitsu Services (FJTSY) has pumped $60 million into its Northern Irish operations in the ended 18 months to create a new software evolution center, doubling its workforce in that place to more than 1,000. India’s biggest PC maker, HCL, came to the north seven years ago and employs 2,000 people in call centers in Belfast and Armagh. And Canadian telecom accoutrement builder Nortel Networks (NT) has 500 workers at a supply-chain contrivance center in Monkstown. The recent permanence is “very conducive to business and investment,” says Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski.