Northern Ireland’s Brexit Edge: Building on what works, not what has failed…

“Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability,  which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.”
— Alfred North Whitehead

Brexit struck me at the time of the referendum (or referen-dum as my old friend Paul would have it) as a weird sort of obsession on the part of a very small sub group of enthusiasts. Similar, but unrelated to the small subgroup of folks who blasted Starmer’s farewell speech yesterday with the choral section from Beethoven’s 9th, better known as the EU anthem, Ode to Joy.

Margaret Mead’s maxim comes to mind, “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.” The jury is out on whether Brexit was either the complete disaster of the Bremainers or the great escape from corporatist tyranny of the hardcore Brexiteer doctrine. The answer is more complicated than either group would happily admit.

For Northern Ireland too, it has not been quite the fast ticket to a UI that local partisans predicted it would be. Talking to one DUP MP in Westminster when the talks to fix Brexit were still underway he privately admitted that he could not see Brexit far enough. As I hope to show, not all the economic downsides we’ve experienced since 2016 arise from the UK’s EU exit.

This chart (from the FT) tells a different story from the one Brexit gets blamed for. Britain’s productivity, measured as output per hour worked, climbs steadily through the 1990s and 2000s, then stops growing around 2008, not the referendum and EU exit markers, which fall on a trend line that had already gone flat eight years earlier. Same with France and Germany.

All three economies break at the global financial crisis and never reclaim their old trend. This a shared advanced economy failure, not a uniquely British or uniquely Brexit one. No, that doesn’t make Brexit costless. Trade friction, lost investment and a labour supply shock plausibly reduced productivity further. But Brexit is a later complication, a close second at most.

After 2008 the trend stopped and nothing replaced it. Underneath it sits decades of stop and start industrial policy, chronically low investment as a share of GDP, thin research and development, and an employment model that became very good at generating jobs while output per hour stalled. Plentiful work masked a profound weakness in productivity levels.

Andi Shehu argues that the story we tell about any problem is never neutral. How we choose to tell it also decides which solutions feel acceptable. But if you measure the wrong thing, you will fix the wrong thing. Blaming Brexit makes the same mistake. It treats a deep structural problem as a simple argument about leaving the EU, so the real work gets left undone.

The one place where Brexit produced a genuinely distinctive economic structure, it is Northern Ireland. Under the Northern Ireland Protocol as revised by the Windsor Framework, Northern Ireland sits in an arrangement no other UK region has. It remains inside the EU single market for goods while staying in the UK customs territory and internal market.

The official term for this bespoke arrangement is dual market access, and the government now promotes it as a unique trading advantage. An Invest NI survey found that 71 percent of businesses believed it was helping them grow. It has introduced frictions for suppliers from Britain. These have continued to be reduced in successive UK negotiations with the EU.

Northern Ireland’s real output grew by 1.5 percent between 2022 and 2023, the second fastest of the twelve UK regions, against a UK figure of just 0.3 percent. Its productivity gap with the rest of the UK has narrowed rather than widened. Real investment has followed, with named commitments tied explicitly to dual access, including a new EU gateway parcel depot and several multi million pound expansions in food and manufacturing.

The number of people in Northern Ireland paying income tax at the higher rate more than doubled between 2020 and 2025, which points to a strengthening professional services and technology job market, even allowing for the frozen tax thresholds that have pulled earners into the higher band across the whole UK.

This does not mean the deeper problems have gone. Northern Ireland still has one of the worst economic inactivity rates in the UK, a low rate of new business formation, and foreign investment per job near the bottom of the regional table. The point is that these are the same long running weaknesses the rest of this argument identifies, and they predate Brexit by decades.

What dual market access has added is a real and measurable advantage layered on top of that base. Northern Ireland is therefore not the exception that disproves the case. It is the one corner of the UK where the post Brexit settlement is doing visible economic work, while the underlying productivity challenge, the genuinely hard problem, remains to be solved.

The advantage itself is partly real, since specific exporters cite it and a new EU gateway parcel depot recently brought hundreds of jobs, and partly promotional, amplified by press releases that naturally quote the firms that benefit rather than the ones absorbing new paperwork, labelling costs and customs authorisation requirements for goods moving from Britain.

But the frictions run in both directions, and Britain remains Northern Ireland’s largest market.

There is also a risk premium the trade flow headlines miss. The arrangement’s durability depends on recurring democratic consent votes, and the most recent passed without cross community support, with every unionist member voting against. That is constitutional uncertainty investors price in. Northern Ireland, then, is the exception that proves the rule.

It is the one corner of the UK with a bespoke, Brexit created economic settlement, and even there the differential status reshapes the plumbing while leaving the pre Brexit productivity weakness fully intact.

So put Brexit in its proper place. The fixes that matter, such as investment, dropping energy costs, financing for domestic firms, a durable industrial strategy, and an employment model that raises output per hour rather than headcount, would matter whether or not Britain had left the EU. Leadership here would, if taken seriously, benefit whomever takes the lead.

Even Northern Ireland, the most Brexit shaped economy in the UK, is not primarily a Brexit story. The task is to stop mismeasuring the problem. Otherwise we will keep on trying to fix the wrong thing. So let’s commit to fixing stuff? Indefinitely.

Mick Fealty

Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty