City Deals: Future to be confirmed after budget announcement

Professor Liam Maguire is the Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research at Ulster Ulster and sits on the board of three out of the four deals.

Speaking to BBC Radio Ulster’s Good Morning Ulster programme, he said these city deal would “improve economic growth and productivity”.

“These are really strong investment projects in local regions, and projects that have been decided by the local regions based on the strengths within those regions.

“It really does align in terms of what the government currently want to do so we would be really hopeful that they can be resumed and work can restart and we can progress these projects as soon as we can,” Prof Maguire said.

Chairman of the Mid South West Governance Steering Group, Kevin Savage, said he “really hopes that the news is positive today”.

“We’re talking about a package of £252m from central government as well as the Executive so we really need this £126m from Westminster to progress this, and that will leverage additional funds as well from the private sector.

“You’re talking about a total for mid-south west in the region on £300m, it’s a large sum of money that we really need in this area, we’ve got great projects and we need to advance these as soon as possible,” Mr Savage said.