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Firm wins £200m weapons deal
Friday, 23 January 2009
The Ministry of Defence today announced a £200m investment at a Belfast-based weapons manufacturing plant.
Thales has been awarded the huge contract to produce and assemble the Starstreak High Velocity Missile (HMV) system until 2020.
The investment will create 40 new jobs this year and will help to sustain more than 100 engineering positions at the company’s site on Alanbrook Road in the east of the city.
Making the announcement today, the Minister of State for Defence Equipment and Support, Quinten Davies, said: “This is an important contract with Thales UK as it ensures the availability of high velocity missiles, a crucial weapon system for the UK armed forces.
“Through this £200m contract we are sustaining technologies within the UK industrial base that are important for our future defence needs, and sustaining up to 100 vital jobs over the next decade. I am committed to providing our armed forces with the best possible equipment to deal with a wide range of potential operations.”
Also at the launch event was Arlene Foster, Minister for Enterprise Trade and Investment, who welcomed the announcement.
She added: “This contract is good news for Northern Ireland’s economy during what is a challenging period for all sectors. It will generate significant additional value and see Thales continue to provide high quality employment well into the future.”
Thales currently employs about 530 of it’s 9,000 UK workforce in Northern Ireland.
Chief Executive Alex Dorrian said: “Belfast has supported the MoD for more than 50 years and the MoD is still the main customer for what we do here. We are pleased to be able to show Quinten Davies the type of technology undertaken in Belfast.”
The super fast Starstreak High Velocity Missile is used by the Army and Royal Marines as a close air defence system. It has an advanced laser-guided weapon which flies at more than three times the speed of sound and is designed to counter threats from high performance low flying aircraft and fast ‘pop up’ strikes by helicopter attacks. The HMV can be fired from the shoulder, from a lightweight multiple launcher or from the Stormer armoured vehicle.
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Can the Minister for Enterprise Trade and Development not find something more useful for Northern Ireland to produce than more weapons of death and destruction, in a world which surely has much, much more than it needs of such things?
Posted by Gerry | 24.01.09, 12:58 GMT
Some good news for a change.
Posted by Richard | 23.01.09, 16:22 GMT
Are we as a society supposed to hail this £200m investment into the manufacture of weapons of indiscriminate death and devastation? I live in Belfast and am currently unemployed, but would never celebrate this announcement. We are all too familiar with death here - be it through the means of rusty guns, fertilized explosives and fire bombs - which for years politicians (particularly Unionist) rallied and cried to have taken out of our own society. Yet these same politicians cannot recognize their own double standards when it comes to actually having weapons of mass murder designed, developed and built in their very back yard! Murder, is murder, is murder, it was once said - unless of course the British war machine is involved - when the rule of law does not apply. Politicians here should practice what they preach.
Posted by Veritas | 23.01.09, 15:50 GMT