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Letter to the Editor
Wednesday October 20
Allstate Unit Plans Ireland Expansion
Northbrook Technology, a software-developing subsidiary of the U.S. insurance giant Allstate Corp., unveiled major expansion plans on October 19 for its Northern Ireland bases.Allstate founded Northbrook Technologies in 1999 to develop and operate computer services for the Northbrook, Illinois-headquartered parent. The project has expanded rapidly with financial backing from the British government.
The announcement said Northbrook -- which already employs more than 700 people at software development centers in Belfast and Northern Ireland's second-largest city, Londonderry -- planned to open new facilities in both cities and a third office in another town, Strabane. The company expects to employ 1,400 people by 2006.
Invest Northern Ireland, the government agency responsible for wooing foreign companies to this long-troubled British territory, said it would provide 5.5 million pounds (US$10 million, euro7.94 million) to aid Northbrook's expansion.
Northbrook Technology's managing director, Bro McFerran, said the company had found it easy to recruit "well-educated and easily motivated people in Belfast and Londonderry keen to develop careers in the IT industry."
The British government minister for enterprise, Barry Gardiner, said the project was "an exceptionally important investment," particularly for Londonderry and Strabane, whose mostly Catholic populations have traditionally suffered from double-digit unemployment. The region has lost thousands of jobs because of closing textile firms, once the backbone of its economy.
Unemployment, particularly within Northern Ireland's Catholic minority, was a major grievance that fueled intercommunal violence starting in the late 1960s. Peacemaking efforts that culminated in the Good Friday peace accord of 1998 have encouraged a wave of foreign investment in Northern Ireland, where unemployment in mid-October fell to 4.7 percent, its lowest rate in history.
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