Thirty million dollars of new investment in Northern Ireland was promised during the New York New Belfast (NYNB) Conference, held virtually last Friday. 

Tom DiNapoli, New York State Comptroller, explained how the investment by the state’s pension fund will come despite the massive challenges faced by New York as a result of the Covid-19 health and financial crisis. 

“We’re confident we’ll weather this tough time, and… we can still be very nimble, we can still seek out opportunities,” he said, explaining there weren’t particular sectors of the economy that investors would be targeting.

“It gets back to the creativity of the people of the north and of the people of Belfast. You have a young and vibrant workforce, a lot of smart people, so we’re looking for creative opportunities and we don’t really limit our investment partners in terms of what they should be looking for.”

He also noted that some $20 billion of funding has been allocated by governments across the globe to invest in potential climate solutions. 

Suzanne Wylie, Chief Executive Officer of Belfast City Council, and chair of the session, asked DiNapoli what kind of leadership would be needed now to help our two cities accelerate their recovery.

 “We need a renewed commitment to inclusion,” he said, “to rebuilding the economy in a way that all communities benefit. There needs to be a renewed focus on use of technology and a renewed discussion on public health.”  

Northern Ireland Finance Minister Conor Murphy outlined the programme of support that had been offered locally during the Coronavirus crisis. He suggested that a top priority for the Stormont Executive should now be to support affordable childcare to help people back into the workforce, learn new skills and have more fulfilling lives. 

This was the eleventh annual NYNB conference, usually held in New York, a brainchild of businessman and former NI Finance Minister, Máirtín Ó Muilleoir, who hosted the day’s proceedings from a studio in Belfast. 

A programme that would usually take several days was deftly crammed by organisers Aisling Events into a technological marathon lasting close to six hours, using YouTube, multiscreen video conferencing and Otter – a conference recording and transcription service. Around 500 people worldwide had registered, although just about half were online at any one time. Conference participation was free, but contributions to Meitheal in New York and the Robin Hood Project in Belfast were invited.

Fairer cities

The dozens of speakers from business, politics, not-for-profit and tourism sectors took part in mini-panel discussions, interspersed with video clips and creative interludes. 

The explicit theme of this year’s gathering was “The Rebuilding Journey” and for once New York could arguably be the more traumatised partner. As one speaker put it: “Everybody knows what an awful past three months we’ve endured in New York City. If you could imagine the 30 years of casualties that the Northern Irish people experienced [during the Troubles] compressed into three months of time. That’s what we’ve experienced.”

Throughout the business sessions the underlying, but dominant, themes were leadership and innovation and the tone was relentlessly upbeat. The timing of the conference coincided with the emergence from lockdown on both sides of the pond. New York State now has the lowest Covid-19 infection rate in the US and is set to completely reopen within the next 30 days. 

Asked what kind of leadership had been necessary during the crisis, Michael Dowling of Northwell Health, the state’s largest healthcare provider, noted the importance of optimism, communication skills and being physically present, giving healthcare staff a sense of comfort, security and trust. 

The lack of national leadership, Dowling said, meant that leadership at ground level was even more important and he and other speakers noted the exemplary leadership of New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo. 

Ritchie Torres, congressional candidate and council member for the Bronx – which has suffered disproportionately from the virus due to the number of essential workers who live there and the area’s overcrowded living conditions – noted that there is a new appreciation for the “politics of competence”, a sentiment which will surely resonate in the UK and Ireland.

Alison Metcalfe, Executive VP of Tourism Ireland in New York reported that tourism has plunged globally by 80% and will take 2 to 3 years to recover. In the future, cohesion and collaboration will be vital and tourists will be looking for travel that is “green, clean and safe”. 

This mantra was echoed by Joe O’Neill, CEO of Belfast Harbour who said it will be a matter of “reset rather than restart”. Organisations will not be able to go back and pick up plans of early 2020; they will need to develop entirely new strategies. Enterprise and innovation will be key, he said. 

Leadership, enterprise and innovation at ground level were modeled in abundance by panelists chaired by John Lee, President of the Irish Business Organisation of New York. Consultant Anita Farmer negotiated permission from the UK government for whiskey distilleries in Northern Ireland to produce ethanol-based hand sanitiser as the pandemic escalated – an initiative that was successful “because everybody worked together”. 

In another example of how the pandemic has inspired collaborative innovation, Ciaran Docherty explained how food packaging company Huhtamaki had worked with Bloc Blinds to become the largest supplier of face shields to the NHS.

Kevin Gamble has moved the annual Feile an Phobail festival in west Belfast – which had been 80% planned when Covid-19 hit – online, enabling it to reach a much larger audience. He foresees that in the future the digital festival will happen alongside the physical one. 

New Jersey restaurateur Francis Schott, meanwhile, put it this way: “I’ve got to get to the other side. I don’t know what’s going to be on the other side. I’ve got to be able to adapt to whatever the future holds, but I don’t know where the shore is and nobody else does.” 

Wearing a mask is no fun, he said, and whatever the future holds, “it has got to be fun.”

Cultural highlights

Interspersed with the business discussions, the day’s cultural highlights were the poem “Kindness” read by Naomi Shihab Nye, the “Prayer for the Rebuilding Journey” offered by Rev Karen Sethuraman, a chaplain to the Lord Mayors of Belfast, and “Broken Land” a compilation tribute to the UK’s National Health Service from The Adventures. 

For Diane Toner of Toner Marketing, it was Vishaan Chakrabarti’s tribute to his friend the late architect Michael Sorkin, a contributor to previous NYNB conferences, which struck the deepest chord.

Chakrabarti, the founder of the Practice for Architecture and Urbanism in New York, said: “I’m convinced that all of our cities across the globe will build back better and stronger. But the question is, will they be fair. And I think that’s one of the big questions that we need to ask ourselves with all of the things that we see on our televisions today and on our phones, not just with the Covid virus, but with strained race relations with clear inequities related to the virus and how it’s impacting different communities.

“And this I think is a good segue into paying homage to my dear past friend and really a son of both cities New York and Belfast, the late great architect Michael Sorkin, whom we recently lost to Covid. 

“Michael was an extraordinary indefatigable spirit, who represented the best in the idea of the public architect the architect who cared not just about what his buildings look like, or his fees, but whether the city was fair, whether it was a just place.”

The conference ended with contributions from civil rights advocates Rev Livingstone Thompson from the Moravian Church in Belfast and Rev Jesse Jackson, speaking on video from Chicago. 

Building back better

This year’s NYNB made for genuinely interesting and riveting viewing. The debate was rooted in the daily experience of a number of mostly relatively small organisations as they navigate their way through a still-opaque crisis using conversation, collaboration, networking and innovative thinking; the sheer will to survive, thrive, contribute – showcasing the best that people can be and do.

David Gavaghan of Aurora Prime Real Estate, a regular at NYNB, praised the organizers for “a great programme and a positive sense of what can be done when we come together. New York New Belfast has risen to the challenge.”

With such stories of inclusion, collaboration, optimism and a politics of competence, it will be clear to the political leaders at Stormont that the “restart” button, any route back to the politics of sectarianism, the politics of the past is now blocked. It too will need to “reset” and find new ways to work in a post-Covid world.

But this is the new complex reality into which the post-Covid 19 world will emerge: the importance of public health, Brexit, equality and inclusion, climate change, plastic pollution. All of these priorities will need to be juggled simultaneously and together will fundamentally affect the rebuilding of both Belfast and New York.