Ni Chamber Annual Lunch 2026, Titanic, Belfast
When Northern Ireland Chamber of Commerce and Industry brought its flagship event of the year to Titanic Belfast, AXL was appointed by the Chamber to deliver the full event production package — from L-Acoustics audio and dual LED video walls through to custom staging, intelligent lighting, presenter support and full multi-camera display infrastructure across the room.
The NI Chamber Annual Lunch 2026 was a sold-out gathering of more than 500 business leaders, policymakers and stakeholders from across the region — one of the most anticipated dates in Northern Ireland's business calendar. The lunch marked the first major engagement of NI Chamber's new President, Neasa Quigley (Joint Head of Corporate at Carson McDowell), and was hosted by broadcaster Claire McCollum, with newly crowned Traitors winner Rachel Duffy appearing as the special guest in an on-stage conversation. The event was delivered with the support of NI Chamber's Communications Partner BT, alongside supporting sponsors Cleaver Fulton Rankin, GMcG, Honeycomb Jobs and Dell Technologies.
For AXL, the booking was a return to working with the Chamber — building on our earlier work supporting NI Chamber Momentum at Galgorm Resort & Spa — and a chance to deliver at the production standard a 500-seat, sold-out, broadcast-quality lunch demands.
Planning a flagship business lunch, awards dinner or membership event at Titanic Belfast or anywhere across Northern Ireland? AXL delivers full-service AV production for organisations who care about the details. Get in touch with Team AXL.
The Brief
A flagship Chamber lunch at this scale has to do several things at once. The room needs to feel like an event, not a meal. Every seat in the house needs clear sight of the stage, sound that works as well in the back rows as the front, and lighting that flatters speakers on camera as well as in person. With a guest speaker of national profile in the room, a host of Claire McCollum's calibre running the show, and a new President making her first major appearance, the production also had to feel composed and corporate from the moment delegates walked in.
The brief broke down into four production challenges:
Build a stage that worked with Titanic Belfast's existing architecture rather than sitting awkwardly on top of it
Anchor the room with broadcast-quality visuals visible from every table
Deliver L-Acoustics-grade audio across a 500-seat room without compromise
Handle two lecterns, a hosted fireside conversation and full audience interaction without reconfiguration
Our Solution
Custom Stage Build — Integrated Into Titanic Belfast's Steps
The stage was a custom-built 16ft x 8ft rectangular platform built into the venue's existing staircase, rather than placed in front of it. Working with the building's architecture rather than against it gave the stage a natural, designed feel — the kind of detail that distinguishes a production-led lunch from a function-room dressing job, and one of the touches that genuinely matters in a venue with as much character as Titanic Belfast.
Dual LED Video Wall Totems — Built for a Wide Room
Visuals were anchored by two 2m x 3m LED video walls at 2.9mm pixel pitch, positioned to bracket the stage and ensure clear sight of branding, presenter slides and on-stage feeds from every table across the long Titanic Hall. The walls were built on full stacking truss bases with Doughty stage weights for ballast, and processed through a Pixelhue P10 4K video switcher for clean, professional source switching throughout the event.
Audience Sightlines — Tabletop Display Infrastructure
Anyone who has worked a 500-seat lunch in a long room knows that the rear tables can struggle to engage with what's happening on stage. To address this, we deployed four landscape 75" TVs on tabletop stands distributed evenly across the room, feeding the same live programme as the in-house projector screens. The result: every table, regardless of how far back from the stage, had clear, close-up access to the speakers, the fireside conversation and the branded content throughout the event.
A separate 65" landscape TV held the seating plan at the entrance — a small detail, but one that matters at a 500-cover lunch with the Chamber's membership.
Sound — L-Acoustics PA
The PA was built around an L-Acoustics system — two L-Acoustics subwoofers paired with four L-Acoustics X8 compact coaxial loudspeakers — driven via a Midas M32r with an S16 digital stagebox. L-Acoustics is the standard you'll find at major touring productions and serious corporate events for a reason: it delivers exceptional clarity and intelligibility at any level, which matters profoundly in a 500-seat banqueting room where the audience needs to hear every word of a fireside conversation as clearly as a more conventional address.
Microphone Infrastructure — Built for Format Flexibility
The mic package supported every format the day's running order could throw at it:
2 x audio technica gooseneck lectern microphones on the two lecterns
3 x Sennheiser e835 G3 handheld wireless for hosted segments, Q&A and announcements and the over-lunch entertainment
3 x Sennheiser EK100 G3 beltpacks with headsets for the host, President and guest speaker in the on-stage conversation
Lighting Design — Speakers on Camera, Room with Energy
The lighting rig combined fixtures for clean key lighting with intelligent fixtures for atmosphere:
4 x 250W LED Profile (LEKO) spotlights providing tight, controlled key lighting on the lecterns and stage area — essential for footage that's usable after the event
8 x Beamz Pro IGNITE300A moving heads for intelligent stage and audience effects
A Beamz Zeus Tubes 8-pack providing vertical visual interest behind the stage
12 x 18W LED PAR uplighters washing the room in NI Chamber's brand colours
The full rig programmed and operated live on an Avolites Titan T3 console
Live Cameras
The entire event was captured on a Sony A7IV Camera, used for live-camera relays on the in-house projection screens and our 4× 75” displays around the room.
Delivery & Technical Support
The build was delivered across a full prep day on Thursday 18th June ahead of the live event on Friday 19th, with four AXL technicians on site from 08:30 through the lunch and de-rig. Multiple display zones, two LED walls, a custom stage build, an L-Acoustics PA and a full lighting rig in a single venue across two days — delivered, operated and dressed by our own team.
The Result
The NI Chamber Annual Lunch 2026 delivered exactly the kind of polished, broadcast-quality production a sold-out flagship event deserves. From the moment delegates entered the room, every detail — the dual LED walls, the integrated stage, the lighting on the speakers, the audio reaching every table, the live tabletop displays — was designed to support the people on stage and the experience of every guest in the room.
A genuine pleasure to deliver another major project for NI Chamber, building on our earlier work supporting NI Chamber Momentum at Galgorm. We're proud to be a trusted production partner for one of Northern Ireland's most important business membership organisations, and look forward to many more.
