Up to 120 jobs are to be created by the Royal Mail, which is to open a new sorting office on a 20-acre greenfield site at Mallusk, in north Belfast. The investment is likely to run into tens of millions of pounds.

Royal Mail employs more than 3,000 people in Northern Ireland, around two-thirds of them at its main sorting office in Belfast city centre. A spokesman for the company said that the new premises had been made necessary by the increase in the volume of mail handled in Northern Ireland, which has increased by 75 per cent since the mid-1980s.

Work on the new centre will begin next year, and is expected to be completed sometime in the year 2000.