By Michael Taggart
City on the rise
IT has been almost a year since Taggart Homes sold our first home at Oak Country Manor at Crescent Link.
More than 100 designer homes later – and 100 families later – and it has been a good year for Taggart Homes.
I know the current discussions around Stormont and Brexit tend to dominate the airwaves but it has also been an incredibly positive year for Derry.
Tourism is helping to transform the city with ever-increasing numbers of visitors taking in the sights and sounds of Derry. If you get time, take a dander along the walls and try to identify and count the number of foreign languages being spoken there every day. It’s incredible.
Right now Tourism Ireland is spending the first tranche of £1M in Britain bringing more visitors to the area via City of Derry airport.
Key to this strategy is not just getting people to come to the city but also stay here overnight and in that both the city council and Tourism Ireland have been hugely successful.
By 2020 it is estimated one million people will visit the city each year, supporting 5,000 jobs locally.
By any measure that is a huge success.
The council and people at visitderry deserve a special mention for all the hard work undertaken to build upon the City of Culture success in 2013. Five years on it’s just getting better.
And hat’s off to whoever came up with the idea of booking TV adverts promoting all that the city has to offer during the recent run of the hilarious ‘Derry Girls’ on Channel Four.
The TV phenomenon pulled in 2.7 million viewers and a second series has already been commissioned. Two of the actors – Saoirse-Monica Jackson who plays Erin, and Jamie Lee O’Donnell who plays Michelle – learned their trade at St Cecilia’s College.
The school motto is Aspire, Endeavour, Achieve. A motto for our whole city perhaps?
Get going in business – you can do it
Getting started in business can be a challenge. When I first started out I had just £1,500 to get me going. But it’s often not the money you have starting out, but the attitude you need to have – ‘yes we can’ still applies today.
In other words, if you want to do it, you can succeed.
These days there’s also help available and there will be plenty of advice locally when Enterprise Week kicks off on Monday March 5th.
Enterprise North West is hosting a week of drop-in days at their offices in Skeoge with a range of professional business advisors available to help with your business plans. They will even help you source funding for that great idea you have. More details are available at www.derrystrabane.com/enterpriseweek
Yes you can.
And finally….
The announcement that the next phase of the A6 dual carriageway from Drumahoe – with 25km route past Dungiven – is a huge step forward. It is something we have been waiting on for more than half a century.
Michael Taggart is Special Adviser to Taggart Homes Ltd at www.taggarthomes.com
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