{"id":660971,"date":"2026-06-27T10:55:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-27T10:55:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/660971\/"},"modified":"2026-06-27T10:55:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-27T10:55:09","slug":"how-has-the-iran-war-hit-the-northern-ireland-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/660971\/","title":{"rendered":"How has the Iran war hit the Northern Ireland economy?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">US and Israeli strikes on Iran began on 28 February with Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz in response.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The strait is a key transport route for oil and gas produced by Gulf states and the reduced supply caused prices to rise across energy markets.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The Ulster Bank&#8217;s monthly growth tracker is a useful way to assess how this fed through to local businesses.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">It suggests that business activity effectively stalled in April and then fell sharply in May.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The May report shows business activity suffered its steepest contraction since December 2022, with NI registering the worst performance of all 12 UK regions.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">For the first time in nearly three and years, local firms were, on balance, pessimistic about future growth prospects.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Some of this has also been seen in the HMRC jobs data.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Payrolls fell in March before rising marginally to just above 820,000 in April and May. The figures also suggest that pay growth stalled in May.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"US and Israeli strikes on Iran began on 28 February with Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz in&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":660972,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,1294,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-660971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=660971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660971\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/660972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=660971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=660971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=660971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}