BELFAST BRIEFING:The 'Five Leaders Five Days' event has shown how the North is open and eager for business
THIRTEEN YEARS ago only a soothsayer might have envisaged a senior executive from an associate company of the New York Stock Exchange saluting Martin McGuinness for his commitment to “creating job opportunities”.
When the Belfast Agreement was signed in 1998, the Sinn Féin chief negotiator might not have sprung to mind as the most obvious investment ambassador for Northern Ireland. But, current terror threats aside, the North is a very different place today.
Its Deputy First Minister for starters is a man widely applauded for the role he has played in “improving” economic opportunities in Northern Ireland.
During a recent visit to the North, Ben Chrnelich, the chief financial officer of NYSE Technologies, said McGuinness was a “a primary driver” behind the group’s decision to expand its operations in Belfast.
NYSE Technologies is the parent company of the American stock exchange and a major investor in Northern Ireland. It plans to create 400 jobs locally so the opinions of its executives are not to be dismissed lightly.
Chrnelich believes McGuinness and his fellow Ministers in the Northern Ireland Executive have proven the North is a business-friendly region and he travelled from New York to Belfast earlier this month to make the point. Chrnelich was also in town to help launch the “Five Leaders Five Days” series organised by the Northern Ireland Chamber of Commerce.
The well-timed (elections loom) refreshing series was designed to give the leaders of the five key local parties an opportunity to brief business people on their economic policies. What the series revealed was a surprisingly sincere, sometimes earnest and undoubtedly candid glimpse of the economic visions of local political leaders and their parties.
DUP leader Peter Robinson revealed he hopes to see corporation tax in Northern Ireland reduced from 26 per cent to 10 per cent. The North’s First Minister also wants the next Northern Ireland Executive to support 20,000 new jobs in the North over the next four years.
He did not reveal how exactly he intends to do this but Robinson was keen to persuade his audience at Citi’s headquarters in Titanic Quarter that the last executive had done all it could. He highlighted that it had frozen business rates, capped manufacturing rates at 30 per cent and introduced a small business rate relief scheme.
On top of that, Robinson said there had been “important changes” within the planning service. He did not choose to provide any examples of those “important changes”. But his assertion that “settled and stable political institutions” are fundamental to building a stronger economy was a theme echoed by all the political leaders.
McGuinness believes the scale of political change achieved in Northern Ireland “provides lessons” for how the North should now approach “its economic difficulties”. “The first is to believe that change is possible, to believe that we can achieve economic prosperity for the benefit of all our people. We need the innovative thinking, the hard decision-making, the dialogue that marked the process of political change. This is not just an issue for policymakers but all levels of our community and business sector,” he said.
McGuinness is concerned the health of the North’s economy has been heavily impacted by what he referred to as the “situation in the South”. This is why he is advocating “greater co-operation across Ireland” rather than the “existing competition”.
As part of its strategy of co-operation, Sinn Féin is advocating that corporation tax levels should be harmonised across the island.
The Alliance Party may have been one of the smaller parties in the last executive but it is talking big on the eve of the elections.
David Ford, party leader and Minister of Justice, said Alliance was “committed to delivering an economic revolution”. He warned that “populist giveaways”, such as free prescriptions for everyone in the North, were not “economic reality”.
Ford believes Northern Ireland’s “window of opportunity is closing” and it needs to develop a road map for economic growth.
The Alliance Party has developed a five-point plan to kickstart the process. It says Northern Ireland should first identify and address the costs of division; it should also secure a reduction in corporation tax levels; and develop its green economy. Ford says it is vital the next executive invests in skills and creates more finance options for high-growth, small firms.
The SDLP also believes it is high time for “ideas and determined action on the economy”. Party leader Margaret Ritchie wants to refocus spending in the short term on job creation and, in the medium term, take “stupid politics” out of the equation when it comes to North/South economic co-operation. “Let us have a 25-year framework economic and ‘financial compact’ with the treasury which maps out the future in terms of tax-varying powers, the creation of our own social security system and the long-term delivery of the block. Where we undertake to very gradually reduce the subvention in the long term, but with a guaranteed level of treasury support – even if the constitutional position of the North should change . . .”
Workable? Perhaps more ambitious than anything else because, as Tom Elliot, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, pointed out, the next executive is immediately going to face “big socioeconomic issues”. He believes the solution lies in three actions. He says Northern Ireland has to grow the private sector and “enhance the power of the social economy” to free people from the poverty trap while ensuring that public service jobs deliver “meaning and purpose”.
Elliot has also advocated that there needs to be a new initiative to encourage more people from the private sector to move into the public sector.
During the “Five Leaders Five Days” series, political leaders demonstrated they have a strong grasp of the economic problems facing the North. But when it comes to solutions, the strategy is not quite so clear.
Collectively, their proposals could generate one overarching economic blueprint that could pull Northern Ireland out of its economic black hole.What they need to find is a better economic script and agree to stick with it.
