Polar opposites

Two different aspects of Northern Ireland life I visited today, the first was a workshop on Venture capital. Lots of businesses looking to move forward with their business idea and get venture capitalists to back them into the next stage of development. The second was a film and discussion backed by healing through remembering around women in Chile who used their needle work skills to protest about what was happening while there was a dictatorship.

Making wall hangings as a way to get the information out of the country on what was actually going on. A good discussion followed about memory and conflict and how is Northern Ireland going to progress it's healing and remembering.

I came away from the discussion with a changed view, I had thought that in NI there was a window of opportunity to gather memories as people are aging and slowly if those memories are not captured they will be lost. However the panel was saying that in some countries its the grandchildren of the people who were involved in the conflict that are only now starting to find out more about how to heal it. I thought it was very interesting that here was a group of women who were using very gender specific skills as a form of protest. The church encouraged them and in many cases paid them a wage to support themselves when doing this and sold the produce in Canada and other areas that the church had influence.

So it struck me that at both of these groups of people were important to NI. One group looking to the past and how to come to terms with it and the other working out ways to get finances to develop business ideas that will provide economic prosperity and move people forward and I could not help but wonder how many of one group were interested or aware of the other?

So speaking of economic prosperity, what do you think about the announcement about finance jobs coming to NI from the South ? I would like to ask what finance jobs? The South says it has thousands of jobs it can't fill, the City of London announce possible 20,000 jobs at risk with the global credit crunch and NI announce possible jobs? Are they just trying to take advantage of lowerer salary levels? I have to admit I know people working in Finance who would love to move back to NI, but it will be interesting to keep an eye of this announcement . Will it actually pan out? Or was it just trying to gloss over announcements by Ulster weavers that they are moving manufacturiing to China plus other negative economic news.