Sir Anthony O'Reilly, perhaps Ireland's most successful entrepreneur, will today appeal to Gordon Brown, the chancellor, to allow Northern Ireland to adopt a special low rate of corporate tax to allow it to compete with the Irish Republic.
The chief executive of Independent News & Media has been a vociferous campaigner - using the pages of the Belfast Telegraph, which IN&M owns - for a competitive rate of tax.
His latest intervention will be welcomed by Ian Paisley, leader of the Democratic Unionists, and Martin McGuinness, Sinn Féin's chief negotiator, who will take their positions next month as first and deputy first minister in a newpower-sharing executive to take over running of the province from London.
Sir Anthony, in a speech today at the opening of IN&M's new print plant in Newry, County Down, will say: "We have done spectacularly well as a company in the south. We believe we can do as well in the north - with just a little help from Gordon Brown and the British Treasury."
But many economists point out that while lower corporate taxes are a big lure for foreign companies, they may not help foster an entrepreneurial mindset in the province, much needed to boost the economy.
Entrepreneurship is far from dead. Qubis, the business incubation unit at Belfast's Queen's University, boasts a better record at producing company spin-outs than any other UK university except Cambridge and Imperial College London.
Damien McLoughlin, chief executive of the Michael Smurfit Business School in Dublin, points to Northern Ireland's heritage of inventiveness, citing John Dunlop, inventor of the pneumatic tyre, and Harry Ferguson, founder of the Massey Ferguson tractor company.
Mr McLoughlin believes that with increased political stability, Northern Ireland should be able to tap into its diaspora - those who left the province during the Troubles - not unlike the way the Irish Republic has done with the return of Irish expatriates to Dublin.
"Headhunters tell us there are just no more paddies to come home but that isn't the case in Northern Ireland. These people represent a huge resource as a business class with international focus," he says.
One such entrepreneur who has returned to Northern Ireland is Terence Brannigan, chief executive of Resource, a so-called soft services company, which specialises in providing cleaning, hygiene, parking and other management services to big retailers.
Mr Brannigan, originally from Northern Ireland, led a buy-in of a local company called Maybin last year. Last month it made its first big acquisition when it bought Masterclean, a private company in Dublin, which provides a similar range of services for some of the multinational companies based in the Irish Republic.
However, there is a long way to go until they scale the heights of the industrial giants that bestrode the Northern Ireland economy.
The province's corpus of publicly listed companies has shrunk dramatically in recent years. Today UTV, the ITV franchise holder, is the only company with a full market listing.
Andor Technologies, a specialist camera maker in west Belfast on the peace line between the Catholic and Protestant neighbourhoods, has a listing on the Alternative Investment Market as does First Derivatives in Newry, which makes software for the financial services industry.
Most home-grown business activity is in small, often family-owned companies.
Of the 57,000 value added tax-registered businesses in Northern Ireland, 89 per cent employ 10 people or fewer and 40 per cent have no employees other than the proprietor.
According to Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, a research body that measures national levels of entrepreneurial activity in 50 countries, Northern Ireland comes bottom of the 12 UK regions, but is broadly in line with levels recorded in Spain, Italy, Germany and France.
As one local venture capitalist said, there is plenty of money available for good business ideas but just too few deals to invest in.
