O’Conall Street

Closing of the Ring premiers at the Waterfront Hall tomorrow and the London Times acknowledge the changing city in its City Diary today. Colin Byrne, our eagle eyed CEO spotted the piece on his commute into the big smoke. He was here last week and was pretty impressed with this city on the march. More on Byrne Baby Byrne.

IKEA also opens tomorrow with its first flagship store on the island. Weber Shandwick has been busy ferrying press about the new Belfast for the mandatory preview tour. It’s hard to believe it was only January when the then Lord Mayor, Pat McCarthy, turned the sod at the Holywood Exchange site bringing to an end one of our most interesting and challenging public affairs projects in recent years. Northern Ireland planning gets a lot of stick and there were more then one or two bumps on the road for IKEA. Thankfully the then Secretary of State Peter Hain was on the ball, keeping the pressure on the system to ensure the iconic store could land ontime by George Best Belfast City Airport.

The Belfast store is huge. 29,000 sq metres of building accommodates a showroom, market hall, warehouse, as well as a 500 seat restaurant, crèche, staff facilities and customer service areas.

Good luck to the blogging Belfast Store Manager Paul Reid and his team. They are part of retail history on this island and I know they will rise to the occasion. O’Conall Street would also like to acknowledge the soft spoken Kerry woman who made it all happen. Theresa Daly was the project Manager who steered the project to permission. She had a hell of a job but as is always the case when you put an experienced woman on the job, got it done without complaining. Off now to measure up for my Billy Shelf.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 9:59 am and is filed under Consumer, Public Affairs, Public Relations, The Media, Weber Shandwick. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.