BELFAST — The U.S. economic envoy to Northern Ireland, Joe Kennedy III, told an audience of visiting investors Wednesday that the feud-prone British territory is “ripe for investment” – even though, nearly nine months into the job, he has yet to nail down a single new dollar for the place.
That lack of confirmed delivery from Kennedy, the former Massachusetts congressman and President Joe Biden’s choice to influence progress in Belfast, formed part of the wider investment-poor theme at the Northern Ireland Investment Summit.
The event, envisioned by U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as a showcase for economic opportunities following February’s achievement of his Windsor Framework trade agreement with the European Union, instead threw an unwelcome spotlight on the region’s unrelenting political dysfunction.
Also attending the event was Democratic Unionist leader Jeffrey Donaldson. His British Protestant and pro-Brexit party has spent the past year blocking the formation of a cross-community government with Irish Catholic leaders, the central goal of Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace accord.
Sunak had hoped Donaldson would lift his boycott following the Windsor Framework breakthrough, but the DUP chief said he would keep blocking any government revival because the Windsor deal — due to go live at Northern Irish ports next month — will reduce but still require EU checks on some goods being shipped from Britain for sale here. The impasse leaves potential investors with no credible government partners at Stormont in Belfast, only Sunak’s often-distracted administration in London.
Kennedy, appointed in December with a mission to drive more U.S. corporate investment to this corner of the United Kingdom, argued that Northern Ireland’s peculiar outcome from Brexit — still subject to EU goods rules that the rest of the U.K. no longer must follow — makes it “all the more attractive” for American firms.
That’s because the Windsor Framework keeps Northern Ireland able to ship goods trade barrier-free into the neighboring Republic of Ireland and wider EU, with its nearly 450 million citizens, as well as to the rest of the U.K.’s 65 million.
And Kennedy insisted that Northern Ireland’s lack of a functioning government wouldn’t deter American firms from choosing it.
He billed Northern Ireland’s political and social divisions as no worse and no less attractive than the Republican and Democratic divide in America.
Referring to the breakdown in Belfast power-sharing, Kennedy said: “Would we love it if things were better? Sure. Would I love it if things were smoother in the United States? Yes, on a lot of levels in a lot of different ways.”
But the potential investors at Wednesday’s event were “not necessarily getting dissuaded because the politics are difficult. Politics are difficult in lots of places. There are a lot of opportunities here anyway.”
While about 230 U.S. companies including Citi, Allstate and Seagate already have bases in Northern Ireland, Kennedy said he remains confident of growing that list, starting when he leads a U.S. trade delegation to Northern Ireland late next month.
Speaking to the U.K.’s investment minister, Dominic Johnson, Kennedy said he wished that mission could have coincided with Wednesday’s event. “We tried very much to align our effort with yours. Unfortunately for bureaucratic reasons we couldn’t.”
