Clare Guinness, chief executive of the Belfast Chamber of Commerce, has made her love for her home city a core part of her professional life.
“I grew up on the Ormeau Road and I’m very proud to be from there,” she says.
“My family lived there for over 40 years. I’m the youngest of seven children.”
Clare was educated at St Dominic’s Grammar School in west Belfast: “I’m very proud of that too. It was an excellent school. I got a great education there. And I deal now with a lot of others who also went to St Dominic’s. So it was a useful place to go.”
At 18, she moved to England after winning scholarship from NatWest to do a finance degree in Loughborough University, which included a year out working in Leeds.
Clare is uncharacteristically shy when explaining why she chose to study finance: “Embarrassingly, I was the school bank manager, and I did A-level economics. Economics was one of my favourite subjects in school. It still is, actually.
“That led me into finance and banking. The scholarship was excellent because it enabled me then to study in England and not be burdened with huge debts.
“It also gave me a lot of work experience throughout the NatWest group, throughout that scholarship.
“I think that work experience proved to be invaluable. I was always combining theoretical knowledge with practical experience. I’m a very practically minded person, so that really suited me.”
Though gaining these professional experiences in England, Clare was drawn back to Northern Ireland for personal reasons.
“My dad got ill at that time and he needed a heart transplant, which he got and was very successful. In fact, he had it for almost 29 years, unbelievably,” she says.
“But when he got ill, I thought: ‘Right, well, I’m just going to go home.’ I’m not sure if that was the right decision or not, but it felt right from a personal perspective.
“I came back again after I graduated and completed my year out. I started in Bank of Ireland in 1997 as a graduate trainee in corporate and business banking and that led to a career of just over 17 years in Bank of Ireland.
“I got the opportunity to work largely in Belfast, in business and corporate banking, but I also worked in Dublin and group credit. And I spent almost five years working in London and specialising in real estate finance.”
Her career in finance saw Clare experience both the heydays of the housing boom — and the crash of 2007-08.
She admits that banking never really recovered from the Great Recession, but her own career in it continued until 2015, when she left Bank of Ireland for a job as director of corporate services with agri co-operative Fane Valley Group.
“That was quite a challenge for me, actually, but really rewarding. The Fane Valley Group has gone through a lot of transformational change and I was involved in large elements of that.
“It was a bit of a baptism of fire in terms of leaving somewhere where you [worked for] 17 years. I knew every wheel and turn in banking, or most of them.”
Clare continued her career with roles at Warrenpoint Harbour, as CEO, and at the Strategic Investment Board, as an innovation district director, before taking her current job with Belfast Chamber 15 months ago.
“I’m hugely passionate about Belfast. I was born and reared here. It’s my city. I’m rearing two children who are 10 and 12.
“The idea that I would be able to be in a role that would influence or better Belfast in any respect is hugely attractive to me.
“I’ve also got a background in business and a very strong business network. I thought that would be beneficial in terms of this particular role.
“I just see it as an opportunity to really better Belfast — and I think Belfast needs some focus and attention at the moment.
“It’s the largest city in Northern Ireland, the capital city. It’s the second city on the island and I don’t believe it’s got the right attention and focus.
“I think there’s so much potential to be unlocked in the city. And I think that, in this role, and particularly with the strong membership we’ve got over many sectors, I can garner some improvements for the city.
“We are the voice of business in Belfast. And I think, with my breadth of experience, which is cross-sectoral and a lot with business and economic development, that I’m well placed to try to make some improvements.”
“I think there’s buckets of potential in Belfast; we just all need to work collaboratively to unlock it.
“There are some issues which are easy to solve, and some are more persistent.”
Clare thinks the running of the city is unnecessarily fractured, explaining: “Leadership in Belfast is split over a number of departments, including Belfast City Council, and I think that’s sub-optimal for the city.
“I look, with some degree of envy, at cities like Manchester, where it has a single Lord Mayor and he has control and influence and many more powers than our council have here.
“I just find that there’s a silo working mentality across the leadership, and of Belfast, which I don’t think is helpful. It’s very slow to get anything done and it’s fragmented in its approach.”
Clare wants to see action taken to regenerate the city centre: “Across numerous departments and numerous stakeholders, there’s been a failure to actually create the right environment for city centre living of any type of scale. And the public realm comes into that too.
“The city, in some areas, needs some attention in terms of investment and improvement so that it’s better for shoppers and the economy and just better for citizens.
“I live in the city myself. I bring my children up in it. There are parts of this city that need some radical intervention in terms of investment and improvement in the public realm.”
Clare sees the Labour Government’s recent increase in employer’s national insurance contributions as an impediment to business.
“We would prefer to see expansionary, rather than contractionary, fiscal policy. And businesses are now going to be spending a considerable amount more on hiring staff, for example.
“I think that will not only deplete profits — so therefore there’s less to reinvest — but it’s also going to make increasing your staff numbers less attractive.”
We suggest to her that, in fact, NI businesses pay proportionately lower contributions to the public sector than other European nations, and that, arguably, increasing that contribution is necessary to see improvements in the city.
Clare responds: “I don’t agree. A lot of the improvements I’ve just talked about are not about needing more money. I think we’re wasting lots of money.
“I think those departments and those various stakeholders aren’t aligned in their spend. There’s obviously been huge talk about reform and transformation in the civil service. I think that’s vital.
“I can go to any problem in the city and find out that there’s one agency, two agencies, three agencies each putting money into that one thing — they’re not joined up.
“I also think sometimes we try to do too much. We should focus on getting some of the basics right and build from there, rather than trying to do everything in one hit.”
Clare loves her role at the Chamber, seeing it as a natural continuation of her previous experience.
She unwinds by running (she is hoping to complete a half marathon in Dubrovnik next year) and by spending time with her family at her home in Stranmillis.
“This has felt like a very natural job to walk into, because I know the city, I know the city economy, I know the regional economy. It feels like the perfect amalgam of all my experiences come together in this role.
“I’m very enthused and very energised, because I think I can make a difference — and Belfast Chamber can make a difference.”