Zamir Farooqi// you are right bigotry and extremists attitudes never pay. Peace and love always win jobs and economic growth..
Ireland Moves From Swords to Chips
On Location
January 13, 2000
by Robert McGarvey
After more than 30 years of civil war that has made it a no-man's-land for international companies, Northern Ireland finally appears ready to take its place at the global high-tech table.
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For the most part U.S. businesses simply ignored Northern Ireland.
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At least that's what Phone.com thinks. Last October, the Silicon Valley developer of software and services for wireless phones paid $239 million for Apion, a wireless access protocol (WAP) developer based in Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland. In the blink of that acquisition, all the bad times suddenly seemed forgotten.
"This is a hugely significant deal, not just for the companies themselves, but for Northern Ireland," says Bruce Robinson, chief executive of the country's Industrial Development Board (IDB).
Apion was spun out of the Dublin?based mobile-phone software developer Aldiscon (which was bought in 1997 by Logica), and its acquisition by Phone.com validates Apion's faith in Northern Ireland. "We opened in 1994," recalls Apion's managing director, Denis Murphy, "because there were good feelings about the peace process, the labor availability was good and the costs of doing business were favorable."
Apion quickly built an impressive reputation. "We established ourselves as one of a few centers of WAP excellence in the world," says Murphy. "People at first didn't believe that you could have a world-class company in Belfast. We showed that it can be done."
The Phone.com deal may be the highlight of high-technology development in Ireland's U.K.-governed northern six counties, but lots of other things are percolating as well, from a sprinkling of hot startups to a sprawling Nortel Networks R&D facility just outside Belfast.
"We've come a very long way in just the past few years," says Robinson. From the start of "the troubles" - a grim campaign begun in 1969 by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to free the counties from British rule - Northern Ireland was a bleak place.
Police had to drive armored vehicles to protect themselves against car bombs and would never step out in public without automatic weaponry and bulletproof vests that could deflect shots from high-power rifles. British soldiers were everywhere, and a war-zone atmosphere permeated the region.
Although a handful of multinational companies - Ford and Seagate among them - did business in Northern Ireland during the troubles, for the most part U.S. businesses simply ignored the place, choosing instead to set up their satellite operations elsewhere in the region, like the Irish Republic, Scotland, Wales and England. But then a couple of things happened that put Northern Ireland back on the map.
Peace Process Opens The Way
The most important change was when the IRA agreed in August 1994 to silence its guns. The cease-fire ended after 17 months, when terrorists detonated a huge bomb at Canary Wharf in London's Docklands.
A bit of tension followed, but in July 1997 the IRA announced another cease-fire, and the leaders of its allied political party, Sinn Fein, entered into regular meetings with U.K. leaders, as well as politicians from the local "loyalist" (pro-British) parties.
The peace process, stewarded by former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, has had its ups and downs, but unlike in past efforts, all parties have remained at the negotiating table and peace finally seems within reach.
Another major factor in Northern Ireland's emergence as a technology center is "the success of Dublin in bringing in tech businesses to the Republic of Ireland," says Robinson. In 10 years, Ireland has become home to a who's who of technology giants, including Apple, Intel and Microsoft. And some of those firms have begun to look north - it's only a two-hour drive from Dublin to Belfast, after all.
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