Page 4 - NMEA Annual Report 2019-2020

CHAIRMAN’S REPORT
2019-20 NWMINEA- WACorTkIVInITNYewREryPORT
We are living through strange and challenging times. This year’s AGM will be the first in this organisation’s history conducted remotely. It is good that we are able to communicate in this way and share information on our activities and perspectives much more widely than ever would have been thought possible. Faced with one of the greatest challenges in most of our lifetimes our team worked exceptionally hard in this pandemic year, 2020, like so many in our community who faced bravely into a ferocious wind of uncertainty unselfishly on behalf of their fellow citizens.` For its part our NMEA team kept the lights on literally and metaphorically, ensuring all our tenants continued to get the services they pay for across the four sites that we manage. But more than that our Financial Controller, Liam Quinn, worked tirelessly to ensure they and many other local businesses were able to secure financial mitigations from government during this crisis. The rest of the team led by our CEO, Dr Conor Patterson, burned the midnight oil to find innovative ways to deliver socially distanced services to clients across our many programmes. Demand for some of these supports was very high, particularly from people wishing to move into self-employment having been made redundant and from vulnerable young people. Superb online training content was produced in our new ThinkLab innovation centre and the Zoom and Teams platforms with which we have all become so familiar were used by our technical guru, Colin Hanna, in ways that their creators probably had never envisaged. Its been very, very tough but we haven’t just managed to stay afloat, we have adapted and have been re-energised because so many in our community will be needing help in the years ahead.
For five years from the announcement in 2015 of a referendum on the UK’s continued membership of the European Union this organisation alongside the Newry Chamber of Commerce, other business groups and community networks north and south on this island lobbied the British Government, the Irish Government and the EU to ensure that border controls between the Republic and Northern Ireland would not be the outcome of the decision by a majority of English voters to take the UK out of the EU. Even the naming of this process by the media in England, Br-exit as opposed to UK-exit, demonstrated that this programme had been conceived with no consideration for Britain’s jurisdictional outpost across the Irish sea, Northern Ireland, the one quarter of an island the rest of which was a sovereign member state of the EU. Our efforts and those of our partners pushed those implications into the very centre of the negotiations. But at all times during that effort we pointed out the contradictions at the heart of Brexit, urged its proponents to re-consider, stressed how divisive it would be within this region and the damage it would do to Irish/British relations more widely.
Our position was that the more the post-Brexit British economic model diverged from that of the EU the sharper and harder would be the boundary, the border, between those two systems. If that hard border was to be on the island of Ireland it would reinforce its partition, unravel the Good Friday Agreement framework and reverse the economic gains made by Newry and its hinterland on the back of free trade. However, we were also clear that a hard Brexit would require a hard border somewhere and that a hard Irish Sea border would also be damaging. Having to choose between evils was not a choice we sought. The Newry region had exemplified the benefits of border-free north/south and east/west trade. Sadly the advocates of Brexit did not listen, they chose to ignore the complexity of rules-based international relations. It is our contention that they did not understand how modern business is conducted and therefore how 21st century economies work. We will be living with the consequences of this ill-thought-out mess for many years. All of that said we have learned much in this time and we are more committed now than ever to promoting cross-community, cross- cultural, cross-sectoral knowledge exchange because it is that which fuels human innovation. In the face of the nativist regression which Brexit encapsulates we have re-committed this organisation to enabling our local companies to internationalise – because we are convinced from our lived experience that that will be their route to success and our path to prosperity for all.
As the Brexit story became more and more complicated and as it grew as a news story covered by media in every EU member state and across the
world our team were increasingly being asked by prospective international partners which part of Ireland they were from and whether it was the part that fell under UK government control. Requests to collaborate in EU transnational projects fell away and we were told many times that this was not because of any decline in interest in our expertise but because of a concern that dealing with a partner based in Northern Ireland would bring complications. As a result we took a decision to revive the WIN Consultants division which we had set up 20 years ago in Dundalk to carry out work in the Irish Republic but which had effectively been dormant for at least a decade as the level of collaboration between north and south and between the north and the rest of the EU made the need for a southern vehicle obsolete. Fielding members of our team under the WIN (EU) banner, the same experts who had been deployed without success under the NMEA banner, has brought EU project approvals and multiple invites to participate in EU projects. WIN (EU) is now a successful trading arm of Newry and Mourne Co-op and Enterprise Agency based at the Creative Spark Centre for Creativity and Innovation in Dundalk. It is currently delivering two significant projects, one for the EU Commission looking at the challenges (and some of the opportunities) presented by the growing GIG Economy and the other the cross border InnovateAccelerate Europe company internationalisation programme. They are both described in some detail within this Report. Whether a Brexit deal is agreed and whatever its terms the fact is that these past five years have been incredibly disruptive and there remains great uncertainty ahead about how the exchange of learning and data and trade in services will be conducted between Northern Ireland and the rest of the EU including the Irish Republic. And so this organisation has to for the foreseeable future deliver significant activities under the WIN (EU) brand (the “N” of which refers to Newry and mourne) away from this region, in a different tax jurisdiction. It works but it shouldn’t have to be this way.
In the first quarter of 2020 we completed the re-development of two vacant industrial units in a front-of house location at WIN Business Park in Newry to create there a high quality environment for the dedicated use of community volunteers and social entrepreneurs who will be supported by NMEA mentors and specialist ‘Champions’ in a programme of knowledge exchange which will focus on devising creative ways to improve lives and communities. This THINKLAB is modeled on the “innovation hubs” which have been built on some university campuses to support business idea generation and commercialisation. However, access to such spaces is restricted often to elite academics and niche entrepreneurs. The WIN ThinkLab will deploy the methods used in such places as well as our own practice techniques developed over 40 years to help communities and individuals challenged by adversity to unlock their potential.
This Activity Report speaks to the creativity and dedication of our Enterprise Agency team. I urge you to read through the detail of the various initiatives reported here. Behind all the facts and figures are hundreds of people who this year were the better for working with that team.
In conclusion, I would like to thank my fellow voluntary directors for their continued support. I would like to also thank all of those who helped us during the year: the Department for Communities (and in particular John Ball, Anita Waite and Karen Gracey who believed in our ThinkLab vision), the Newry Neighbourhood Renewal Partnership without whose support the ThinkLab would not have got off the blocks, Newry Mourne and Down District Council who continue to show faith in the work that we do, The Big Lottery Fund, Invest Northern Ireland, Newry Chamber of Commerce and Trade, the County Armagh Development Trust, Kilkeel Development Association, the Confederation of Community Groups, Enterprise Northern Ireland, the Louth County Council Local Enterprise Office, the Dundalk Chamber of Commerce, the Meath Local Enterprise Office, Southern Regional College, the European Union, our local politicians and the press, local, national and international.
Peter McEvoy Chairman
21st December 2020
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