Invest Northern Ireland

It was a Northern Irish agreement, um, for, you know, businesses to come and invest in Northern Ireland.

So it was Invest NI who brought them in, and they were here from 2011.

And then, oh my goodness, what an amazing job and how many experiences I had in that.

So I was there for nine y- almost nine years, um, and worked in Dubai and Norway and, uh, Connecticut in America.

We have got them through the...

the labeling fda laws and we've got them really prepared for it and then there is a little bit of fear and what happens next and pca has maybe over 60 000 um products in in each of their warehouses it's probably more than that now uh so what happens to a brand when it gets in there how is that brand promoted and but we look at um the scalability of that brand my sort of job effectively is to identify those brands that are out there and work with people like yourselves and if there is a referral coming through to say these guys are actually performing well they are looking for other markets then we would take them I know Invest NI and other people will do that and they'll prepare people for market readiness but PCA is a purchaser so we can actually create the purchase orders we're the buyer at the end of the day as well and we want to see any of the brands that come to us actually performing well and then expanding and So I've had a couple of conversations with government bodies of how they could assist us in helping or putting together a pilot project to launch a brand in the States.

But yeah, and it goes in reverse.

And that's why... we joined with you guys effectively to move all of our warehousing that we have in the UK and also in the Netherlands to one spot, which was here under the Windsor Framework Agreement, which suited the accessibility to the UK and European markets with unfettered access.

This is how we can talk about, well, what's it like in a new Ireland to have a significant British minority population? Not a unionist minority, a significant minority.

British minority population, and bearing in mind there's over 100,000 British citizens in the Republic today, combine them with the British population who we'd call unionists, largely living in the very north-east of the island now, how can we make that work like the Finns do with their 12% Swedish population? Imagine the investment we could get if Invest NI isn't competing against the IDA imagine the opportunities that's presented our all island rugby and cricket teams are a lot more successful than our partitioned football teams I think that's and like again I could fill 48 hours of a podcast going into the detail of it but those are the two headline answers I suppose

It's quite transactional, Neil.

And it's not to remove, for instance, the emotive kind of political sentiment.

Ireland? last year's results, the year before results.

And this is the new restructured Invest NI, which are now in their fourth year of their new business plan, which regional development or regional balance is at the heart of it.

57% of all jobs created in Northern Ireland went to Belfast City Council last year, and the year before was the same.

Nothing has changed from your time to now.

And like the company, they currently employ about 900 people.

Invest Northern Ireland, they're supporting the company's investment with a £3.2 million grant.

So it's absolutely huge.

Like the firm said, they'll carry out in the centre like R&D to develop... new processes and technology solutions for these blue chip clients.