Progress is forging away in the background

I know out there my daffodils are struggling, the snowdrops I planted last year are nowhere to be seen and a section of the main hedge has decided to lie down, due, we think, to the remains of the tree trunks that have propped it up for years having buckled under the strain. These combinations of nature are all a bit like real life when you think about it.

With our politicians fighting like ferrets in a sack, Boris is no longer the darling of Ulster given how he’s apt to break a promise five minutes after he makes it, leaving the rest of us wishing we could roll him into a snowman then give him time to reconsider his position before we allow him to melt.

Yes, we are in a pickle ‘thanks to them at Westminster’, as a neighbour described to me this week.

And yet...I was studying some headlines this week and began to wonder what country I was actually living in. There appears to be progress forging away there in the background where it matters. Our high street might be a shambles with no big names to speak of planning to take over those empty stores, but how’s this for my first headline from the Daily Telegraph: ‘Belfast’s engineering roots helping start-up hub for digital age to bloom’.

Belfast, particularly the docks area is ‘fast becoming one of the UK’s most promising tech centres’ with ‘the city’s engineers growing increasingly entrepreneurial and using their knowledge of medicine, AI and cybersecurity to start new businesses’.

And to think we imagine that this sort of advancement happens only in places like Silicon Valley or even China and that the only worthwhile thing going on at the docks is Titanic history. How wrong can we be?

Another headline, ‘we are poised to become a Pacific player’ comes from Liz Truss, Westminister’s Secretary of State for International Trade and President of the Board of Trade had me drooling.

Ms Truss is out there ‘fighting for fair and free trade’ obviously now we’ve ditched the EU. This week she was ‘presenting our formal letter of application to New Zealand and Japan to join them in one of the world’s largest trading areas: the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans Pacific Partnership. How impressive does that sound, considering how we’ve been pandering to the EU for the past three decades, to be allowed to do more of our own thing? Why didn’t we ditch Europe years ago? Being an independent trading nation sounds quite important, don’t you think? Better than clinging to the skirts of Ms Ursula von der Leyen who currently presides over the EU and was prepared to send us into near oblivion not two weeks ago.

There’s more help for our local businesses in the form of Belfast’s GDP Partnership – an all-Ireland financial solutions based company set up in 2010 to help people in business. It has launched a new Pandemic Recovery Team with the hope of saving up to 100 local businesses this year.

Another newspaper declares that ‘Belfast is fast becoming one of the UK’s most promising new tech hubs’. Technology companies in Northern Ireland had ‘a record year for funding, bringing in £45.6m in investment in 2020’.

Now all that suggests we are doing well, but our shops are not doing at all and it’s painful to see our pubs, hotels and eating establishments doing no business at all.

We might be bogged down in the politics of The Protocol, but behind the scenes business people are beavering away using advanced technology to give us some kind of future for when the pandemic has gone and Boris, Nicola, Arlene and Ursula hopefully will have bitten the dust.

This is our Centenary year, unfortunately falling at a time when celebrations are going to be greatly curtailed.

But it is worth celebrating.

Business is in there determined to keep us afloat. We owe them.