Northern Ireland protocol delivers for some

Back in 2017, Co Armagh-based pharmaceutical company Almac made an appearance before Westminster’s Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, where it acknowledged that a recent decision to open a factory in Dundalk, Co Louth, was linked to Brexit.

The company told the committee of fears Border checks could eat into its competitive offering, with the Dundalk decision made very quickly after the UK voted to leave the European Union in 2016. Seven years on, the business continues to operate its EU headquarters from Dundalk, also counting a facility in Athlone, Co Westmeath, within its network.

The Dundalk move and the committee appearance prompted hand-wringing from some of the North’s politicians, who worried about Almac’s future there. The multinational has long been one of the North’s most successful home-grown businesses, having been founded by the late Sir Allen McClay in 1968 and expanded to employ several thousand people around the world.

Almac in 2017 was steadfast in reassuring anybody who was interested that, despite Dundalk, it was most committed to the North.

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This week. evidence of that commitment took on the most concrete of forms as Almac said it would invest £80 million (€92 million) in new manufacturing, production and diagnostic facilities at its Craigavon headquarters, with assistance from Invest NI, the North’s equivalent of IDA Ireland. The facilities will, among other things, support Almac’s development and commercialisation of new treatment options in therapy areas including oncology and immunology.

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The pharma group’s investment is expected to create more than 550 jobs locally, with Almac saying an international recruitment drive would create 1,000 jobs in the North over three years. Even the hand-wringers would have to admit that commitments don’t get much more committed than this.

So how does the pharma group feel about Brexit now? Helpfully, it spells it out extensively on its website, outlining to customers how it is “uniquely placed” to act as a one-stop shop for activities such as biomarker clinical trial support because of its “easy access to both the EU and the UK”.

It refers to the “special status that Northern Ireland has been granted” under the Northern Ireland protocol (now modified by the Windsor Framework), which it explains allows companies such as Almac “the opportunity to effectively act as if they are still within the EU”. Crucially, it speaks of clarity, confidence and reassurance in relation to Brexit, a position it is putting its own money behind with this latest expansion.