First announced by President Biden during his visit in April, Northern Ireland put itself in the shop window in September at a major international investment conference in September 2023.
This was no insignificant event, as more than 200 international investors from 20-plus countries were welcomed to Belfast by, among others, three secretaries of state, three UK Government ministers and NI Civil Service chief Jayne Brady.
There were 18 leading-edge innovators and two world-class universities on show, 30 expert speakers on stage, and they were addressed by one US Economic Envoy, one Princess Royal and two Oscar winners!
The event was a collaboration between the Department for Business & Trade, the Northern Ireland Office and Invest NI, for whom you could say 2023 was a year of two contrasting halves.
In February, an independent review had castigated Invest NI, claiming “dysfunction and division at its leadership level” was harming its economic performance.
Ex-BBC chairman Sir Michael Lyons spent the best part of a year looking deep within the £160 million-a-year arm’s length body with the economist Maureen O’Reilly and veteran business figure Dame Rotha Johnston.
The panel made 17 recommendations, published across 371 pages, calling for “urgent” and “profound change” within Invest NI.
The report said that while the agency remains best placed to take forward the north’s economic development activities, there is “considerable room” for reform and repurposing of its leadership, structure, operation, control and public accountability.
Invest NI did change during 2023, and in October appointed Kieran Donoghue, a member of the executive leadership team of IDA Ireland, as its new chief executive.
Ahead of the autumn economic conference, there were a number of significant job creation announcements, most of which which had a direct support input from Invest NI.
In February financial services group FinTrU, one of the north’s greatest business success stories of the last decade, confirmed a further major expansion into Derry which will see it add 300 more jobs in the city.
The move, part of a £20 million investment by the firm, will pump £8.6m a year in extra salaries into the Derry economy and doubles FinTrU’s payroll there.
And while it will also take the award-winning company’s overall staff numbers to beyond 1,500 (it also has offices in Belfast, Letterkenny, Porto, Dublin, London, Maastricht and New York), the growth won’t end there.
“I’m unashamedly ambitious, and we aren’t stopping hiring anytime soon,” the firm’s founder and chief executive Darragh McCarthy said.
But the biggest jobs announcement of 2023 came to coincide with the investment conference, when professional services firm EY said it was creating 1,000 jobs in Northern Ireland over the next five years in a move that will bring its total headcount to 1,900.
To support this growth, EY will establish a hub in the north west to attract talent from across the region.
The roles will be filled by a mix of experienced candidates, recent graduates and school leavers in areas such as cyber security, data analytics, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies, risk, tax, and audit as well as business consultancy.
Then in October, pharmaceuticals group Almac has announced plans to create 550 jobs in an £80 million investment at its Craigavon headquarters.
The company is set to develop a new 100,000 sq ft manufacturing centre of excellence and a 40,000 sq ft diagnostic development and manufacturing centre.
Almac said the completion of the two major facilities will support the creation of hundreds more jobs at the north Armagh site, spanning a range of lab and non-lab-based roles.
The announcement comes two years after Almac accounted plans to create around 1,000 new jobs in the north over a three-year period.
