NORTHERN IRELAND faces challenging times ahead to create jobs and attract inward investment, according to Invest Northern Ireland, which has published its provisional figures for the year to the end of March.
Invest NI reported that it had announced the creation of almost 6,500 jobs during the year but that 79 of its clients, “facing declining order books”, had announced 3,499 redundancies.
The majority of these were in the second half of the year.
The organisation said that while it had announced 6,494 jobs and safeguarded 951 jobs, it could not say for certain that all of the promised jobs would materialise.
Invest NI chairman Stephen Kingon said that for the first time, its clients made investment commitments of more than £1 billion (€1.1 billion) in a single year, commitments which would ultimately see the economy benefit from £165 million annually in wages.
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