Dr. Conor Patterson:

Senator Craughwell made a point about the public sector. In the mid-1990s, I moved back to Newry from Scotland where I had been working in Aberdeen, which is in the north-east of the country. At that point, part of my role was to try to encourage early cross-Border collaboration and so I carried out an audit of the Newry-Dundalk cross-Border region that was funded by the International Fund for Ireland. One of the findings of that audit was that there was very little contact between the two public sectors, never mind the people who crossed from one jurisdiction to the other to work in the public sector. The officials in the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs in the North had next to no contact with, or knowledge of, their equivalent departmental officials in the South. It is no exaggeration to say that the two public sectors worked back to back.

Many observers take the view that the cross-Border bodies established under the Good Friday Agreement, including InterTradeIreland, are under-funded relative to their aspiration when they were set up and that this has constrained their ability to work. To my knowledge they are the only areas of the public sector where there is significant mixing of experts and officials from both sides of the Border. The problems that are being experienced here, for example, in the health service in terms of recruiting doctors and nurses apply equally in the North. There is also a skills shortage in the North. Similarly, the public sector contraction being experienced in the South is also being experienced in the North. The public sector is not a sector brim-full of opportunities of employment. One area of the public sector in which there has been a lot of collaboration is health, with many people from the North travelling South to Dublin for heart surgery funded by the NHS. This is an acknowledgement that Dublin has a critical mass of resources and expertise in that discipline. There are other examples where the opposite applies, including Altnagelvin Area Hospital in the north-west and the South West Acute Hospital in Enniskillen.

On education, Mr. Conway and I are graduates of a Dublin university. We have both observed that since we studied here in the 1970s and 1980s, there has been a significant decline in the number of people travelling from the Northern Ireland jurisdiction across the Border to the South to study. There are issues around the valuing and weighting given to A levels relative to the leaving certificate in terms of how A levels matriculate for entry into higher education institutions in the South. However, I do not propose to go into detail in that regard now. Dundalk Institute of Technology has worked hard to attract students from the North but the numbers remain low. For example, at the last count there were almost three times the number of students from China attending the institute as there were students from the entire jurisdiction of Northern Ireland. Dundalk Institute of Technology is a fabulous institution with great facilities but, again, young people are experiencing difficulty matriculating into particular courses based on their A levels, which are relative to what they can do within the further education, FE, sector in the North. As I said, the two jurisdictions are developing back-to-back. On this issue and many others, including the treatment of qualifications, there is a need for greater harmonisation.