Could protocol make Northern Ireland the ‘Singapore of Europe’?

Irwin Armstrong , a veteran Tory and founder of a healthcare diagnostics company, is adamant: the Northern Ireland protocol could transform the region into “the Singapore of Europe”.

A former member of the Conservative party’s national governing body, the 71 year old from north Antrim’s unionist heartland is among the few who dare defy the predictable tribal divisions over post-Brexit arrangements.

A proud unionist and unapologetic Brexiteer, Armstrong has taken flak for resisting the hegemony of his own background to call the North’s unique access to both EU and British markets as he sees it – “a golden opportunity”.

“I get a lot of criticism from people on the more extreme side of the unionist community,” he says.

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Armstrong’s CIGA Healthcare makes pregnancy test kits as well as diagnostics for ovulation, menopause and blood pressure and exports to more than 70 countries.

Since the protocol, his Ballymena-based company, with its advantage over British rivals bogged down in Brexit red tape, is “expanding very rapidly”. Sales to the Republic have doubled. Last month, he signed a €4.7 million contract for new markets in Europe and the Middle East. He says “every five seconds someone somewhere is using one of our tests”.

But it is not just his own company reaping the rewards. He points to the opportunities for other northern-based medical and pharmaceutical firms like Randox, Almac and Norbrook, and strong growth in the fintech, accountancy and legal sectors and says many London firms now have large offices in Belfast.

“We are very well-placed, with good universities turning out lots of graduates. They are all going south, and we need to bring them back north.

“The protocol has the ability to make Northern Ireland the Singapore of Europe. If full access to GB and EU markets remains, it also makes us a very attractive inward-investment location.”

Despite the trouble it gets him in with some unionists, who insist the Irish Sea border for certain goods to protect the EU single market is a diminution of their Britishness, he argues their approach is self-defeating.

“If we had a decent set of politicians here, we could have a golden opportunity to turn Northern Ireland around,” he says.

“As I keep telling unionist friends, we should be supporting that. If you are a nationalist you should definitely not be supporting that, because it could mean a united Ireland being completely untenable for the next 10 years – or ever.

United Ireland

“If we get the economic situation in Northern Ireland sorted out, people will not vote for a united Ireland if they are being offered a much better deal here.”

Although economic indicators show the North outperforming the rest of the UK under its special Brexit arrangements, some unionist leaders are simply “denying the facts”, says Armstrong.

“Or they are saying ‘we don’t care what the facts are, we are British, and anything that diminishes our Britishness is bad. We don’t care if it makes us all rich or there will be no unemployment, that matters much less than our Britishness.’

“That is part of the problem. It is a very narrow view of the world… The problem here is that politicians – and this sounds ridiculous, but it is true – don’t represent the people of Northern Ireland.

“They represent the extremes of people in Northern Ireland, not the view on the street. Our political leaders are followers, not leaders, following extremists and not leading the debate and that’s why we are where we are.”

Armstrong spoke out against the online vitriol directed at Stephen Kelly, chief executive of industry representative group Manufacturing NI, for publishing economic evidence in favour of the protocol.

The sharp end of the abuse was mostly from anonymous loyalist accounts, accusing Kelly of bias simply because he is a Catholic from Derry.

Kelly says a “Twitter pile on”, including some threats, over the last couple of months was “a very deliberate act”.

“I knew I was being selected as the person to have a go at,” he says. The increasingly febrile atmosphere around the protocol has resulted in him advising business owners not to speak publicly about their own experience of the protocol.

“There’s undoubtedly an effort to whip people... No one appears to be trying to build consensus on any side on anything at the moment and that’s a very bad place to be.”

‘Constitutional outlook’

Business groups like Manufacturing NI exist to represent the views of their industry and are not coloured by “people’s constitutional outlook”, says Kelly .

Both Manufacturing NI and the Chambers of Commerce carry out surveys of traders and have “very similar results, [that the] vast majority of businesses in the North are over [the protocol] and are just getting on with it”.

“I do think things have become so toxic around this,” he adds.

He said businesses cannot deal with the constitutional question. “What we can do is make it simpler, cheaper, more sustainable to move goods from Great Britain into Northern Ireland while at the same time maintaining the obvious economic benefit.”

“Some businesses are continuing to struggle with it but those are in the minority.”

That minority is a concern to Roger Pollen of the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB).

The organisation is carrying out research to counter a “lack of appetite among politicians to measure the range of businesses that are negatively impacted by the operation of the protocol”.

“But what is of real concern is the way local politics have overshadowed the process,” he says.

“There has been an unhelpful, implicit suggestion that businesses which might be perceived to be from one side of the community are broadly happy with the protocol, while those from the other are not.”

This is “patently a distortion”, warns Pollen.

“Some business owners have been content to share the problems they are experiencing and are willing for their issues to be publicised, but some have explicitly asked not to be identified,” he says.

Pollen says the protocol is causing difficulties for a wide range of businesses, irrespective of their owners’ political preferences.

“Any influences that intimidate people from speaking up about their very real difficulties will make it harder to find good solutions and, ultimately, this does a disservice to all business owners.”