Peace campaigners have attacked moves aimed at expanding the weapons and aerospace industries in Northern Ireland as "morally wrong and economically dangerous".
In a report published last Friday, the Dublin-based AFrI peace and justice group said there was a growing dependency on the arms trade in the North, with more than 8,000 people now employed directly or indirectly in weapons-related companies.
It was a "cruel irony", the report said, that while peace was being consolidated, with demilitarisation and decommissioning being negotiated, the North was being marketed internationally as a centre of aviation excellence and a prime location for weapons manufacturing.
More than 300 jobs have been announced in the sector in the past 18 months, including 140 at Belfast's Short Brothers and 150 at Raytheon Systems in Derry, for the development of a new spy-plane radar system for the British Ministry of Defence.
The report, What Price Peace? The Irish Peace Process and the International Arms Trade, profiled a number of companies involved in the production of military-related technology. According to the report, Northern Ireland's growing dependency on the arms trade ran counter to an international trend towards converting military industries.
"Extensive research in the last 20 years has shown how spending on military research and development and production is detrimental to the wider economy and industry of a nation," the report stated. Claims that weapons manufacturing had spin-off benefits for the civil economy were a "fallacy", it said, as production processes tended to be technologically specific and large-scale.
In a preface to the report, Derry-based economist Dr Robbie McVeigh said there was a "sad paradox" in the fact that the same governments and politicians who sought to take the gun out of Irish politics were seeking to expand the North's arms industry. "The reassuring aspect of this is meant to be that these weapons will be used to kill people somewhere other than Ireland," he said.
The report concluded that "allowing inward investment for the production of military-related goods in Northern Ireland, far from capitalising on the expected peace dividend, reflects a failure on behalf of the British government to convert the existing military industrial base within the North, and to adequately plan for the structural adjustments that are a necessary part of the peace process.
"What is needed is a concerted programme of support to convert existing military industry to civilian use, and also greater support to economic activity that is servicing local needs."
