'Because a thriving Northern Ireland is not a Belfast story': ​Call for greater support for regional businesses

UK Small Business Week gives us a moment to pause and celebrate something that rarely makes the front page: the quiet, determined ambition of entrepreneurs building successful businesses.

I firmly believe, and the data increasingly confirms, Northern Ireland’s economic future will not be built in Belfast alone.

This is not a criticism of Belfast. It is a recognition that right across this region, in Derry/Londonderry, in the manufacturing heartland of Mid-Ulster, in the cross-border commerce of Newry and, in dozens of towns and rural communities in between, there is a generation of business owners who are growing, hiring, exporting and innovating.

They deserve to be seen and they deserve access to the finance that will help them go further.

It is easy, when discussing economic development, to default to the capital city as the primary unit of analysis. But a robust Northern Ireland cannot work that way.

Derry/Londonderry, the second city, was a globally-renowned centre for shirt making and is today, home to a growing tech and creative industries sector.

Mid-Ulster is home to a concentration of precision engineering and manufacturing firms and Fermanagh is famous for its artisan crafts.

While Newry, sitting on the M1 corridor between Belfast and Dublin, is primed to become one of most dynamic commercial centres on the island.

These are not peripheral communities waiting for investment to trickle out from the capital. They are centres of genuine economic growth in their own right.

And yet, when it comes to awareness of and access to business finance, geography still creates barriers that ambition alone cannot overcome.

At the British Business Bank, our mission is to make finance markets work better for smaller businesses right across the UK and that means Belleek and Garvagh as much as it means Bristol or Edinburgh.

Consider AES Global. A wireless intercom firm, based in Cookstown, that operates in the global market.

Through the Investment Fund for Northern Ireland, the British Business Bank helped AES, which started as a team of three people in a garden shed in County Tyrone, grow to become a company with a 30,000 sq. ft. facility and offices in England and Florida.

This is Mid-Ulster manufacturing firing on all cylinders.

Or, take Needi, the female-founded tech start-up based in Armagh, which received £450,000 in equity funding through IFNI.

These are not outliers. They are representative of a much wider pattern. In 2024/25 alone, the British Business Bank supported 600 smaller businesses across Northern Ireland — support expected to create 1,100 jobs and generate £300 million in

additional business turnover.

Northern Ireland has genuine structural advantages that make the opportunity ahead very real. Its young, well-educated population. Its unique dual market access, that gives businesses here a reach into both British and European markets that firms elsewhere simply do not have.

Its strong sectoral clusters, from agri-food to advanced manufacturing to fintech. And perhaps most importantly, a culture of entrepreneurship that runs deep, particularly outside the capital.

But structural advantages only convert into economic growth if businesses have the tools they need to act on them. Finance is one of those tools and awareness is the first step.

All too often, founders outside Belfast tell us they did not know what support was available or assumed it was not meant for them.

That has to change and I am optimistic it will. Since launching the Investment Fund for Northern Ireland, we have deployed £30 million into 35 businesses — leveraging an additional £45 million in private co-investment alongside it. That means more than

£75 million reaching businesses in communities from Boho to Ballywalter.

This UK Small Business Week, I want to issue a direct invitation to every business owner in Northern Ireland to find out what finance might be available to them.

Not because growth is an obligation, but because ambition deserves a fair hearing, regardless of your postcode.

Because a thriving Northern Ireland is not a Belfast story. It’s a story that belongs to all of us.