Dr. John Bradley:

I do not understand where the idea of unifying the IDA and Enterprise Ireland might have come from in my writing. The problem with the cross-Border region is that it is a region of low population density with very few urban centres and foreign firms tend to locate around large cities, such as Limerick, Galway, Cork and Belfast. Enterprise Ireland has the more difficult task of creating indigenous businesses in regions with a low population density. When they were broken up some ten or 15 years ago, it was a very logical break-up.

I was asked about competition between the Southern and Northern agencies. This is very natural as they are competitors and it is like asking two runners in a race to co-operate as to who will win. One will always do one's best to win. This, however, is where the tragedy of InterTrade Ireland comes in. That could have been an embryonic cross-Border development synthesis. It could have been to cross-Border industrialisation what, say, the European Coal and Steel Community was to the European Union in that it could have evolved similarly. For political reasons, into which I will not go but with which I am sure members are only too familiar, this never happened and is not going to happen.

As policy-makers sitting in Dáil Éireann and Seanad Éireann, Members tend to look at the world from the perspective of a policy-maker. Senator Quinn, who looks at the world from the point of view of enterprises, knows that the world looks very different from that perspective. I am told that the recent initiatives by IBEC and the CBI in Northern Ireland are resulting in a massive increase in cross-Border interest on the part of firms. This is taking place entirely within the private sector and is not being hindered by the policy dysfunctionality between North and South, although it is not being helped by it either. What is needed is to encourage the private sectors, North and South, to take on the responsibility for evolving and co-operating and not to imagine that policy-makers are ignorant of what is going on, waiting for the private sector to push them in one direction or another. Our experience and our research show that businessmen are very clever and know more about the business environment in which they work than policy-makers. Policy-makers sometimes make policies that are inappropriate to the conditions of business and we found some glaring examples of this in our research.