Belfast has seen a flurry of investment in recent years

Economy Minister Sir Reg Empey was among the first to note the irony that as the blight of 30 years of terrorism was finally being thrown off, that it was terrorism directed at United States and a global economic slowdown, which was causing us to catch cold.

Just two weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the east Belfast aerospace manufacturer Shorts, owned by the Canadian company Bombardier, announced that it is to cut 2,000 jobs - 900 of them by January.

Northern Ireland's largest single jobs loss in decades was followed by British Airways' decision to axe its Belfast-Heathrow route - the shuttle service traditionally used by business commuters.

Other announcements about job losses have come raining in. The Northern Ireland operation of the globally-based computer electronics firm EM Solutions is to cut 90 jobs at its base in Lisburn, County Antrim.

And there are fears of more payoffs at the County Antrim plant of telecommunications company Nortel, which is to cut 20,000 jobs worldwide.

It is obvious the province's economy is suffering a haemorrhage deeper than just the short-term results of the US attacks.

Worker's perspective

Jad, a 27-year-old aircraft engineer from Belfast, agrees.

A contractor, who had been working on the aft top panel of the Bombardier CRJ 200 regional jet, he has already lost his job before Shorts have even told their own staff which positions will have to go.

I have spent ten years getting the skills for this job, and why would a company want to retrain me when they can get people who already have the skills they want?

Jad, aircraft engineer

"They are just using America as an excuse. We knew for months the aircraft industry was going bad. Reading the trade magazines you realised that a lot of the aircraft companies and airlines were losing money," he said.

"I was staff at Shorts, but I went contracting about a year ago.

"At that time I was often refusing work from the agencies, I had so many offers. But recently you could tell how things were going.

"Over the last six months it has been quieter and people were sticking in the jobs they had instead of moving around a lot."

With more than ten years of his working life invested in becoming qualified and skilled in this sector, Jad isn't about to take up the government offers of retraining opportunities.

"I'm going to stick with this for the moment. It is pointless me trying to train up in something else. I have spent ten years getting the skills for this job, and why would a company want to retrain me when they can get people who already have the skills they want?"

He added: "It isn't looking good for getting another job at the minute, but people are going to have to start flying again sometime.

"I am hoping I will be able to weather it out for three or six months. And I'm hoping that the airlines, who are already losing money with their planes on the ground, will start looking at getting work done on them like conversions into cargo planes."

Retraining challenge

David McGrath, 31, who worked as a printer for 10 years, was forced to consider retraining after a serious back injury three years ago. It meant he had to give up his job as a printing press operator.

He is relieved he had invested in health insurance which gave him a financial safety net and time to look at his options.

David McGrath is retraining to work in the IT sector

"At first I did a few of the government retraining schemes, but they were useless. The government have no interest in providing you with really good skills.

"They just want you to train in something really basic and get you off their benefit books into work as quickly as possible," he said.

"If I didn't have my health plan, they'd have me working in a call centre by now."

David is now doing an online Open University BSc honours degree in Information Technology and Computing.

"I am quite confident I'll get a job when I finish the degree. The OU provide you with career guidance and guide you towards a specific job when you specialise at the end," he said.

Job market conditions

Meanwhile, the recruitment agencies say that despite the murmurs of a possible recession on the way, the jobs market is still quite buoyant in Northern Ireland in many sectors.

The construction industry is still buoyant

John Moore, office manager of Hays Montrose, a Belfast agency specialising in engineering recruitment said: "There is an element of wait-and-see. It hasn't been as buoyant as in the last two-three years, but in broad-brush terms the industry is very healthy.

"We have seen an 11% increase in building in the housing market. On the commercial side, one of our management consultants is building new stores for B&Q and Tesco and there are lots of office developments - the only area which is tailing off is in the apartment-building sector."

He added: "Because of the renewed capital investment by the government in roads, bridges and sewage schemes, our clients are crying out for structures agents, civil engineers and project managers."

But he said most of the agency's clients are looking for people who already have specialised skills.

"I have been speaking to three clients today who are actively recruiting. But you don't become a chartered engineer overnight."

Ken Belshaw of Grafton Recruitment, one of the province's largest recruitment agencies in a wide variety of sectors, said: "It is surprising, we are still doing quite well.

Companies are looking for workers with specialised skills

"We are quite protected in Northern Ireland because of the high level of government spending here.

"But we are down 40% in the IT and technology sector on the same quarter last year.

"And we are waiting for the Shorts job losses to hit. We are already feeling the effects from Nortel, which had been one of our biggest clients."

Mr Belshaw said many companies were still recruiting, but for a lot of people it was on a temporary basis, so that companies could maintain flexibility in their workforces to react to market conditions.

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"We are still recruiting large numbers of temporary factory floor operators for companies like Montupet and Seagate. But unfortunately, as we have seen in Shorts, Nortel and maybe in FG Wilson, these are the first jobs to go.

"But the office and financial sectors are still strong, as is recruitment for accounting."

He said there were still some sectors where companies were having difficulty finding staff.

"We need software engineers, office staff, legal secretaries, HGV drivers, petrol tanker drivers, CNC computer numerical controllers and skilled lathe controllers - we even had to recruit two people from South Africa for one firm."

'Gloomy forecast'

Leading economist and business analyst John Simpson said Northern Ireland was going to see more job losses like those at Shorts and in the telecoms companies.

Describing the current climate as "threatening and worrying," he said: "We may not see such big numbers of jobs going at once, but we will see more job losses.

"It is much more to do with the global slowdown than fall-out from America. The terror attacks gave it the whole thing a push. But they came on top of something that was going wrong anyway."