Newry Chamber highlighted the benefits of Dual Market Access (DMA) for our local businesses based in the Greater Newry Area and how they can maximise the opportunities at a workshop in partnership with Invest Northern Ireland and Fortior Insight on Tuesday 24th February at Invest NI’s Southern Regional Office in Newry.
Our members and representatives from the local business community heard superb presentations from Alastair James, Head of Market Access at Invest NI and Jonathan Walsh, Director of Fortior Insight, two of the foremost specialists in this area in NI.
The room understood the immense opportunity, with many businesses in the Greater Newry Area actively trading both North-South and East-West and genuinely leveraging NI’s unique trading position.
There is good reason for that optimism with a survey of our members carried out just last month, indicating that 76% of respondents saying Dual Market Access is working for them.
DMA is real, structurally unique and Newry’s strategic location at the centre of the Dublin Belfast Economic Corridor (DBEC) gives us and unrivalled trading position with access to the UK & EU Markets puts us on the cusp of something really exciting in this region in economic terms.
In a room, broadly supportive of NI’s trading arrangements under the Windsor Framework, especially given the nature of cross-border business in Greater Newry, the message was not about dismantling the framework; it was about making the mechanisms more user-friendly.
A big thank to you to Alastair and Jonathan for their extensive, detailed and engaging interactions yesterday and we would also like to wish Alastair every success having recently taken up his new post with Invest NI as Head of Market Access.
Thanks to Alistair Quinn and John McKibben from Invest NI for kindly hosting the event at their Southern Regional Office in Newry.