Thales: Who the firm behind Belfast's £1.6bn Ukraine missile deal are, and how they came to be in Northern Ireland - and how to pronounce their name
In a quiet part of East Belfast lie the Belfast headquarters of one of Northern Ireland’s biggest manufacturing success stories – and one that’s gone largely unheralded.
Nestled away among car mechanics and catering firms in the Castlereagh Industrial Estate, a business hive in a mainly residential area, is the Northern Ireland factory of arms firm Thales.
Since Prime Minister Keir Starmer last Sunday evening (2nd) announced the Belfast factory was to receive a contract to build 5,000 air defence missiles to aid Ukraine, the firm has unveiled plans taking it from strength to strength.
Soon to open a third facility in the province, on top of its Belfast plant and testing range in the County Down countryside between Ballynahinch and Downpatrick, Thales will also be taking on an additional 200 members of staff on top of the 850 it already employs here.
The French-owned business is normally fairly secretive; it has to be, as what goes on behind the closed doors of its factory can be matters of national or even international security.
But Thales is been in town a long while – more than 30 years, in fact, starting in Northern Ireland with one of the most famous names the province’s industrial sector had during the 20th century.
Thales traces its origins in the province to a deal with the Short Brothers aerospace company, which established a missile division in 1952.
Shorts was bought by Bombardier in 1989. Four years later, it partnered with French company Thomson-CSF to from Shorts Missile Systems, which specialised in the design and development of short-range air defence weaponry.
Thomson-CSF became the missile company’s sole owner in 1998, and in 2000 rebranded as Thales.
Pronounced “Tal-es”, the name’s derived from 6th century BC Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus – a man regarded as the first true philosopher of the Ancient Greek tradition that went on to produce Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
The entire Thales group is a huge multinational affair; operating in close to 70 countries, it’s the 17th largest defence contractor in the world.
In Northern Ireland, recent projects have included manufacturing anti-tank bazookas that saw use against Russian vehicles in Ukraine, as well as a helicopter-borne surveillance system for the Royal Navy.
Thales has also ventured into the space industry, in Belfast producing state of the art propulsion systems for geostationary satellites that can allow them to carry heavier loads, or reduces the cost of launching them.
The plant even has a special “space clean room” that allows highly specialised and precise advanced hardware to be assembled without contamination.
The firm has also linked up with both Queen’s University Belfast and the Ulster University to attract the brightest and best young talent Northern Ireland has to offer, and recently launched a “skills academy” to boost the knowledge of its apprentices.
In 2022, the Belfast plant was visited by two Prime Ministers in quick succession; Boris Johnson in May, as he arrived for talks with Stormont parties, then Rishi Sunak in August, while he was on the campaign trail in his leadership battle with Liz Truss after Johnson’s resignation. Sunak lost, but took over the country that October after the brief Truss tenure.