Business

Our Man in Cannes reports daily from MIPIM

Ahead of the annual MIPIM showcase this week, the Irish News will be producing a daily diary by 'Our Man in Cannes'

:: THE former chief executive of a well-known public sector body (it used to be charged with the regeneration of the Lagan and its riverside sites) once told a younger member of his staff to take the smile off his face when he was told he was going to MIPIM. “It’s hard work you know”, the CEO said. His younger colleague couldn’t help himself all the same since instead of drudging his way through a wet week in March in Belfast, he was headed for Cannes and the spring sunshine of the Cote d’Azur. Why would he not be smiling?

:: Your diarist’s first visit to MIPIM was sometime in the early to mid-2000s when the property boom was powdered and ready to fire and the “my boat’s bigger than your boat” mentality was already kicking in. While MIPIM is the largest property exhibition in the world and there are loads of French, German, Italians, Americans, Russians etc, the ones you notice are the English. At least 10,000 of them come down from London to eat, drink and be loud on the streets and boats of Cannes. You can’t miss them. Cannes itself gets taken over, every berth in the harbour was booked a year ago, if you want a hotel room at this stage, you have to stay 20 minutes away in Nice and the champagne consumption per head is comparable to the amount of WKD drunk in the Holylands on St Patrick’s Day.

:: Speaking of St Patrick’s Day, perhaps the one place in the world where Northerners (outside of Belfast) can claim to do it better and bigger than our southern brethren is MIPIM in Cannes. Belfast hosts the St Patrick’s Day party in the aptly named ‘Ma Nolan’s Irish Pub and last year it was rockin’. It was the party to be at, for a few hours anyway, as the Doherty Baines (a London property company) party on the largest boat in the harbour, wasn’t bad either.

:: So that’s the scene, there are at least 100 people flying down from over 30 companies from Belfast to quaff champagne and sell their wares, it should be a hard week ahead. And while that may sound frivolous, the truth is a lot of hard work is going to get done and it is really great that Belfast is properly represented, though when you see how large the presence of the likes of Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and London is at MIPIM, you know we still have a long road to go.

:: (By the way, the last time the Irish News attended MIPIM was for the launch of the Titanic Quarter’s master plan in 2004. The short straw went to the current political correspondent, John Manley, who got an extra night on the Cote d’Azur when all flights were cancelled because of a French air traffic controller strike. Monsieur Manley and about 20 other intrepid Belfast explorers ended up taking a train to Paris and a flight home from there, 24 hours later than expected. C’est la vie).