The 6th Annual Sir George Quigley Memorial Lecture

“Is it time (once again) to revisit the idea of a Dublin-Belfast Economic Corridor?”

Sir George Quigley made the argument in the early 1990s that “the island’s potential will not be realised unless there develops between Belfast and Dublin the normal economic and business interaction which one would expect to see between cities only 100 miles apart. And it genuinely needs to be an economic corridor and not simply a tunnel, with nothing happening in the space between the two cities.”

This year’s lecture focused on the Dublin-Belfast Economic Corridor, beginning with the current profile of the Corridor as economies reopen from COVID-19 related shutdowns and asked whether the two cities and the region between are acting as the “growth hormone” Sir George wanted to see. It also outlined the most recent initiative to bring a fresh focus to the Economic Corridor and some of the opportunities and priorities identified by the local government network behind this. Finally, the lecture went back to the ideas that lay behind Sir George’s original Economic Corridor concept and asked whether all or some of these still remain relevant 30 years on or need to be overhauled and replaced.

Further information including an the executive summary and full report on the development of the Dublin-Belfast Economic Corridor is available at – www.dbec.info