Northerners love flame-grilled, meaty crisps but they will try new flavours too, while their southern counterparts are more cautious, with 60 per cent opting for that most traditional of fare, the bag of cheese and onion.
So says Tom Keogh, the managing director of Keogh’s Crisps, based in the Oldtown, north Co Dublin, who began selling in Northern Ireland in 2013, after he was approached by a Warrenpoint, Co Down wholesaler.
The difference in tastes have been just one of the lessons learned from supplying shops and stores across Northern Ireland: “In the beginning we were sending up pallets. Today we are sending up truckloads.”
“I see it as the same market just with a different currency. The people are the same,” Keogh tells The Irish Times, though he is surprised by how rarely he is asked by other businesses in the Republic about “selling up North”.
“A lot of southern businesses do overlook the North. There are 1.8 million people up there. In my experience, a lot of businesses in [the Republic] when they think about exporting, don’t think about Northern Ireland.
“People don’t understand how big of an opportunity it is. It did surprise me when I started looking at it first. I didn’t realise how many people are there,” Keogh says.
The growth in cross-Border trade since the Good Friday Agreement was signed has been dramatic, rising from €2 billion in both directions in 1998 to more than €15 billion today.
But even if he is not often asked about it, Keogh is not alone. Over the past decade, sales north of the Border by southern businesses have grown by nearly 60 per cent, while Northern firms have sold 90 per cent more in the South than they did before.
“We’re in a really good place, actually. For all of the noise that was made about Brexit, the reality is, as always happens, business gets on with doing business,” says John McGrane, director general of the British Irish Chamber of Commerce.
So, were the doomsday predictions wrong about the dangers of Brexit? Or have people simply found ways around it? Or is it that Brexit never really happened at all? McGrane is asked.
“No, yes and no,” he replies quickly, “We weren’t wrong. What we said was, if the worst form of Brexit was to come about, there would be mayhem. So, all of us working together made sure that we didn’t get the worst outcome.
Are you able to deliver a service to the standard they want in the way they want? It doesn’t matter where it’s administered. For them, that’s irrelevant
— Barry Byrne, Mount Charles
“Indeed, we got pragmatic outcomes,” he says, highlighting the changes to supply chains that have taken place, where Northern Ireland now buys far more of the goods from the Republic and other EU states that were once supplied by British firms.
However, much more is possible, if the rhetoric heard by 600 business and political leaders at Thursday’s inaugural Dublin Belfast Economic Corridor (DBEC) conference in Belfast is to be believed.
Behind the DBEC plan lie eight local authorities – those of Dublin; Fingal; Louth; and Meath in the Republic, along with Belfast; Lisburn and Castlereagh; Armagh, Banbridge and Craigavon; and Newry and Mourne councils in Northern Ireland – alongside Dublin City University and Ulster University.
Modelled, perhaps, on the arc between Oxford and Cambridge in England, the conference heard that the corridor between, and including, Dublin and Belfast could transform Ireland into “a leading European business hub”.
Though not the catchiest title, perhaps, the “corridor” covers the 100 miles/160km between Dublin and Belfast, which is home to more than two million people and to the majority of economic activity on the island.
It is, say the local authorities, “a visionary project that unites both jurisdictions, creating a powerful economic zone that stands poised to attract significant investment, boost trade and foster world-class innovation”.
The opportunities offered by DBEC, and, more broadly, by North-South interaction across the island could do much to address Northern Ireland’s economic woes, says Barry Byrne, chief executive of the Belfast-based facilities company Mount Charles.
“If we keep doing what we’ve always done we’re going to get the same result. The macroeconomic model shows that GDP forecast figures are just going to decline if nothing changes. Northern Ireland is in a bit of a subdued state as an economy,” says Byrne, who leads a company that has, over the past decade or so, won contracts across nearly every part of the island.
Lessons have been learned by the Ormeau Road-headquartered Mount Charles along the way. Partly because of Brexit, but also for regulatory and other issues, the company set up a stand-alone operation registered in the Republic.
The differences are often stark. The market and opportunities are “bigger in the South”, says Byrne, adding that it is much more dominated by privately owned businesses, often foreign multinationals.
But if the opportunities are bigger in the Republic, so too are the costs – sometimes eye-wateringly so. Wages are “easily 20, or 30 per cent higher”, while every other cost is higher too, though a lower corporation tax rate helps.
Northern Irish business has been smarter in the relationship. They see the advantages of a bigger market and a wealthier market, and they’ve been tapping into it
— Danny McCoy, Ibec
Equally, there is a degree of parochialism among locally owned firms, which partly explains the decision not to try to run everything directly from Belfast: “People wanted to know that we were committed,” he tells The Irish Times.
“We’ve been growing organically. We’re looking at potential acquisitions,” says Byrne, adding that big international clients “don’t care, or any have issues” about dealing with Northern Irish firms “because they’re getting some services daily from Asia”.
“It doesn’t matter. Are you able to deliver a service to the standard they want in the way they want? It doesn’t matter where it’s administered. For them, that’s irrelevant. It really is,” he says.
Mount Charles has recruited heavily in the Republic: “Service quality, responsiveness and just the knowledge of the local geography is really important, so we try to deliver services as close to the customer as we cans,” says Byrne.
The company’s experience mirrors what is happening elsewhere, says Danny McCoy, chief executive of Ibec, the Dublin-based business lobby group, with Northern Ireland firms more likely to hunt for business in the Republic than the other way round.
“Northern SMEs selling Georgian windows are more likely to drive past places in Northern Ireland that can afford them to come all the way down to Dublin because the margins are higher here,” he says.
[ Stronger economic growth in Republic has positive ‘spillover’ in NorthOpens in new window ]
“Northern Irish business has been smarter in the relationship. They see the advantages of a bigger market and a wealthier market, and they’ve been tapping into it.”
However, there is much more to do. Citing the gravity model favoured by economists, McCoy says the amount of cross-Border trade that takes place “falls away exponentially the further one goes from the Border”.
In many cases, businesses in Cork and Kerry would never even think about doing business in Northern Ireland. “It just wouldn’t occur to them. It’s not that they have objections; they just don’t even think about it,” he says.
Pointing to particular highlights, McCoy’s Ibec colleague Fergal O’Brien cites pharmaceuticals and chemicals, as well as engineering and the dairy industry, which increasingly operates on an all-island basis.
The Republic is exceptionally strong in pharmaceutical companies but Northern Irish firms with expertise in chemicals and engineering have found ways to do business with them – “a particular standout, that”, says O’Brien.
However, O’Brien warns that an all-island labour market does not yet exist and barriers to cross-Border working, especially remote working, immigration issues, recognition of standards etc, need to be addressed, though the solutions are far from simple.
Sometimes the scale of the challenge needed to improve all-island co-operation are daunting, as highlighted by KPMG’s head of sustainability, Russell Smyth, who points to the delays in building the North-South electricity interconnector.
Years in the drafting, planning permission was granted in 2107 but construction will not now even begin until 2031. “Without it, Northern Ireland is wasting 20 per cent of its renewable energy production. And that’s just one consequence,” he says.
However, the logic of co-operation is undeniable, Smyth argues, pointing to Northern Ireland’s strength in anaerobic digestion using farm and food waste, and the Republic’s strength in plastics recycling: “That improves the circular economy for everyone.”
Tracking what people are doing is not always easy, since the statistics available do not fully capture everything about cross-Border trade that is happening because of different rules and information flows to the respective statistical agencies.
In Dublin, the Central Statistics Office collects data on cross-Border trade on the back of VAT receipts for goods, but not for services. It can also sometimes be difficult to separate export sales sent to Northern Ireland from those sent to customers in Britain.
The cross-Border data from Northern Ireland’s Statistical Research Agency is more detailed than the numbers collected in the Republic “because the Republic is a much bigger market for them, than it is for us”, says one source.
For now, the Windsor Framework has brought some calm to relations between the United Kingdom and the European Union in the post-Brexit era, though it has significantly complicated life for people in Northern Ireland wanting to buy goods from Britain.
Such complications have boosted North-South trade. Many Northern firms – and Northern Ireland is part of the European Union’s single market for goods – now source product seamlessly from the Republic, rather than dealing with the paperwork of working with a UK supplier.
However, there may be some clouds on the horizon. Trade will become more complicated if EU and UK regulations diverge in the years ahead, threatening to leave Northern Ireland in no man’s land. Equally, there is the short-term prospect of tariffs from US president Donald Trump that could see the UK and the EU facing different penalties. Regarding goods, Northern Ireland will face the EU tariff, not the UK one – something that could irk unionists.
“If we have a different tariff regime between the UK and Europe then that’s going to give us some challenges for the all-island economy, absolutely. That’s something we’re going to have to watch closely,” says Fergal O’Brien.
For now, politics has taken a back seat, though the Democratic Unionist Party is ever quick to find subjects for complaint. Unhappiness can be found elsewhere in Northern Irish society, too, as has been seen in the ongoing difficulties trying to agree a UK-EU deal on veterinary medicines for Northern Ireland.
Sometimes, the arguments should not be dismissed, one former agri-foods executive says, citing the mockery that DUP MP Sammy Wilson faced when he complained that frozen sausages sold by a UK supermarket chain could not be sold in its outlets in Northern Ireland.
“He was talking to people who could only afford cheap sausages ... that were coming in from Britain,” says the now retired executive, adding that “the regulations made [this] more difficult”.
“That was hurting poor people, not those who laughed at Sammy, so people should be a little more careful sometimes about dismissing criticism. Sometimes, there is a point.”
