The fastest-growing part of the all-island economy can't be loaded onto a lorry at all. It's an architect in Belfast drawing for a Dublin developer, the Armagh accountancy firm serving clients in three counties, or a software team in Derry shipping code to a customer it has never met in person. And for a category of trade that now accounts for a quarter of everything Northern Ireland and Ireland sell to each other, it gets a remarkably small share of the conversation.
1: The Headline is Not the Full Story
Bilateral services trade between Northern Ireland and Ireland has more than quadrupled since 2011, rising from around £0.8bn to £3.6bn on the official figures. Its share of total cross-border trade has climbed from 14% to 25% over the same period, and five of those percentage points arrived in just the last two years. Between 2018 and 2024, services trade grew at roughly 16% a year while goods managed around 12%.
Goods still added more in absolute terms, as a bigger base growing solidly tends to do. But if you want to know where the momentum is, it's in the intangibles. And even £3.6bn understates this, because the official source excludes financial services and tourism. Add those back in and the bilateral relationship is worth closer to £5.3bn, with Northern Ireland running a services trade surplus with Ireland of around £2bn (about 3% of its entire GDP.) Ireland is now Northern Ireland's largest services export market outside Great Britain, taking around 44% of everything NI sells in services beyond the UK.
That’s not a rounding error in the trade story. In several respects it is the trade story. So why does it feel like a footnote?
2: We've Been Watching the Wrong Border
There are two main reasons for this. The first is boring but decisive: goods are easier to count. A physical product crosses a border and leaves a trail: a customs declaration, a manifest, a number in a spreadsheet, and reasonably quickly. A service often leaves no such trail. Instead, it has to be estimated through firm surveys and statistical modelling, which takes a long time to do properly, and so the official data arrives with a lag of more than a year. When one thing can be measured cleanly and promptly and the other must be measured partially and more slowly, the former tends to dominate the briefings, the targets and the ministerial lines. We manage what we can see, and services have been genuinely hard to observe.
The second reason is that we have all been busy. For the better part of a decade the political and administrative bandwidth of this island and beyond was consumed by the mechanics of goods: what could move, under what checks, with what paperwork, under which framework. That work mattered enormously, and it continues to be an important part of our support offering through our Trade Hub. But it had an opportunity cost, and part of that cost was analytical attention. While the entire policy machine was focused on keeping lorries moving, the services economy trucked on in the background.
3: We Can Track Policy, Not Just Trade
There’s a very important reason that we should all pay more attention to services trade. This isn't just a niche worth tidying up for the sake of completeness or for the statistics nerds like me. The sectors driving cross-border services growth are, disproportionately, high-value, knowledge-intensive ones, sectors that governments on both sides of the border have explicitly identified as priorities. These include financial services and fintech, IT, software and cybersecurity, where Belfast has built real strengths. Life sciences, with research and clinical linkages that already run the length of the island. Construction services, the single largest bilateral category, growing at around 21% a year and which are essential for our infrastructure and housing pipelines.
These are the activities that anchor productive, well-paid employment, precisely the good jobs and higher productivity outcomes that sit at the centre of Northern Ireland's economic strategy. When we under-count services trade, we don't just misstate a statistic. We overlook the part of the cross-border economy most capable of raising incomes on both sides of the border and of delivering on joint policy priorities.
4: There's Always a Catch
Services barriers are almost never tariffs; it’s fairly difficult to levy a duty on a legal opinion at a checkpoint. They tend to be regulatory, embedded in the rules of whichever market you are serving. And since Brexit, this island has two sets of rules for services, unlike goods. Services in Ireland are governed by EU frameworks; services in Northern Ireland operate under UK law. The Windsor Framework, so central to the goods debate, largely doesn't reach services, which fall under the broader UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement, which offers only thin liberalisation for services and leaves the relationship closer to basic WTO terms than most people assume.
This dual environment is already producing real divergence, not merely theoretical risk. In banking, the UK has delayed its Basel 3.1 reforms while the EU pressed ahead, opening a gap in prudential rules. In digital, the EU's comprehensive AI Act sits alongside a lighter, principles-based UK approach, with direct consequences for the software and IT firms trading across the border. And divergence doesn't only happen by design; it accumulates passively, every time one jurisdiction adopts a rule the other doesn't. Some Northern Ireland financial firms have already concluded that the simplest response is to set up a separate legal entity in Ireland rather than serve the market from across the border.
The important qualifier is that firms don't experience this as a wall. The frictions that bite hardest are practical rather than prohibitive: uncertainty about VAT and payroll, poor visibility of opportunities, the ordinary difficulty of building a network in another jurisdiction. These fall heaviest on SMEs, who face the same fixed costs of entry as large firms with a fraction of the resources to absorb them.
