#TheReset

#TheReset – It’s an Employers Market… Is it not?

Ellie Francis on September 15, 2020, 12:15 pm

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In the wake of Coronavirus, business owners are looking for silver linings in the rubble around them. A key shift would seem to be in the employment market where, for some time now, employees have ruled the roost. At the beginning of the year, companies scrambled to impress current and prospective talent, trying to convince them of the ‘why us’ component of their employment offer. They invested in Employer Branding and Employee Experience as a priority for their budget and …

#TheReset – David Gavaghan on the future of relationships on these islands in a Covid-19 world…

Soapbox on September 14, 2020, 8:06 am

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David Gavaghan is the founder of Aurora Prime Real Estate Ltd. He is also a Non- Executive Director of CBI NI. Read a profile here or follow him on Twitter… The after-effects of Covid-19 on these two islands is currently very unclear but one thing is certain, the impact of the past few months has been seismic. There are huge adverse consequences for all parts of Britain, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The ramifications are potentially much more …

#TheReset – Simon Hamilton on what will Belfast be for?

Soapbox on September 11, 2020, 10:26 am

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Simon Hamilton is an ex DUP MLA & Finance Minister. He is currently Chief Executive of Belfast Chamber of Trade and Commerce. You can follow him on Twitter Back at the beginning of 2020, I wrote a piece that appeared in the local press in which I predicted that “better times were ahead” for Belfast. The rationale for my optimistic outlook was that, with a deal struck on Brexit, a Conservative Government at Westminster with a whopping majority and the …

#TheReset-We cannot build back better if we don’t put our environment at the heart of it.

Soapbox on September 10, 2020, 8:00 am

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Ian Humphreys is the Chief Executive of Keep Northern Ireland Beautiful. The Reset is an apt description for the type of change that the COVID-19 pandemic has presented to us over the past six months. Our lives have been changed and priorities re-evaluated as we grapple with an uncertain future. For the environment sector, we have long argued (perhaps too meekly) for a new way of doing things. Our lifestyle of increasing carbon emissions and ignoring the consequences of waste …

#TheReset: Sheer fluidity of technological change means our cultural industries should be more central than ever

Mick Fealty on September 9, 2020, 6:58 am

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It’s hard to think of a working sector in society that delivers quite so much social, cultural, and economic benefits to society at large but where the living for those talented individuals who often devote their lives to it is quite so precarious than in the Arts and Cultural industries. In today’s Cargo of Bricks, I speak to Ali FitzGibbon and discover how the long slow and steady bottom-up development of Northern Ireland’s cultural industries over the last thirty years …

#TheReset: Renewed focus on Apprenticeships can help young people deal

Soapbox on September 8, 2020, 8:01 am

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Richard Kirk is CEO of Belfast-based Workplus, which was set up to help businesses explore apprenticeships as a way of finding new talent or up-skilling existing employees. Here he argues that apprenticeships can help young people to “earn, learn and be part of the solution” to the oncoming economic crisis… At the end of August, some Southern states in America braced itself for Hurricane Laura – the region’s most powerful hurricane in over a century and the joint fastest in …

#TheReset-A safe, secure, and affordable place to call home can never be overstated, not least during a public health crisis

Soapbox on September 7, 2020, 8:00 am

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Heather Wilson is the Policy and Engagement Manager for Chartered Institute of Housing in Northern Ireland. Today she writes about the future of housing. The coronavirus pandemic and subsequent lockdown brought about challenges never before faced by the housing sector in Northern Ireland. The almost instantaneous inter-agency cooperation that emerged during the early days of lockdown to make Northern Ireland the first and only jurisdiction across these islands to place all rough sleepers into accommodation sent a strong signal of …

If we are serious about better economic outcomes, Ministers and political parties have to take on the NIMBYs…

Mick Fealty on September 4, 2020, 2:22 pm

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Newton Emerson has a nice piece in the Irish Times in which he demonstrates the tight hold NIMBY lobbies have on either side of the border, even on parties who’s main policy plank are in favour as something as seemingly important as the all island electricity market… He starts with the question: Would Electric Ireland be putting prices in the Republic up by 3.4 per cent if the new cross-Border interconnector was in place? The answer, he says, is that… …

#TheReset – Belfast City Centre’s loss is the rest of Northern Ireland’s gain…

Brian O'Neill on September 4, 2020, 8:02 am

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I have not been in the City Centre since February and to be honest, I have no desire to rush back anytime soon. Even before the pandemic, it was not a great experience – noisy, dirty, lots of traffic, a harsh natureless environment, a notable increase in beggars and addicts. It is a pity because having a wander around the city centre was an activity that many of us grew up on. But lately, it has lost its attraction. Of …

The Reset: Profound change on the island is likely to be slow and multigenerational, but it has to start now…

Mick Fealty on September 3, 2020, 2:37 pm

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I’m grateful to Brian Feeney in the Irish News for drawing my attention to a bravura performance in the Feile by my old friend David McWilliams. In my defence it happened on my birthday and so I was enjoying the fresh air on the edge of Brecon Beacons National Park. So I missed it. There’s some tough challenging lines in there for northern unionism (and northern nationalism besides), some of which I agree with, some of which I don’t and …

#TheReset: Time to wake up to Covid’s economic challenges and get beyond our long sleepy capture by the Status Quo…

Mick Fealty on September 2, 2020, 7:00 am

| Readers 1222

And after a brief break after the first series of the Cargo Of Bricks, we start the second series in partnership with Ulster Bank with a brief introduction from Richard Ramsey to the Reset Project, an overview of where Northern Ireland finds itself regarding Covid and how to get involved in #TheReset. Powered by RedCircle In it he covers… How politicians need to take heart from their ability to work under the pressure of the crisis and change things that …

#TheReset: Slashing The Presenteeism Umbilical Cord…

Ellie Francis on August 28, 2020, 8:20 am

| Readers 578

Recent months have seen a significant change in the way we work. On Friday 13th March 2020, Northern Ireland’s workforce made their usual commute home from the office, and the majority of them haven’t returned since. While a number of our local employers embraced working from home as an option for their team prior to lockdown, few of them had engaged in a remote-working-only strategy rendering their office lease and funky fit-out somewhat redundant. While the early days of moving …

#TheReset: Reducing the risk of ‘stag-deflation’ after COVID…

Jay Burbank on August 26, 2020, 7:13 am

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If the post COVID ‘reset’ works, then it will have to move beyond longstanding structural thorns that western society has so far failed to deal with. The great twentieth century historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote that the period from 1945 to the early 1970s were a ‘golden age’ in human achievement and it was only the breakdown of the mid to late 1970s of economic wellbeing and living standards that broke this unprecedented period of growth. In the height of this …

Introducing #TheReset – how we can react positively to the challenge of Covid-19? A new project from Slugger in partnership with the Ulster Bank…

Brian O'Neill on August 6, 2020, 3:34 pm

| Readers 1148

We are living through historic times. Never has the Lenin quote ‘“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen” been more apt. We are witnessing considerable changes to our way of life – the way we work, the way we learn, the way we shop, the way we spend our free time. Some of this change will be negative, but some will also be positive. Slugger is launching a new project around how we can …