Professor Edgar Morgenroth:

I might come in on this one, although I would like to finish the previous point. Once we have people who leave school early, their labour market outcomes are particularly bad. Often, they do not ever work. That is a matter I studied in the Republic of Ireland about 20 years ago and it was quite stark. It is a very big issue.

The other issue we point to in the paper is the outmigration of highly skilled people with university degrees. The Northern Ireland economy is leaking those individuals.

In terms of productive investment, there was a time when the infrastructure in Northern Ireland was considerably better than that of the Republic but that is a time in history now. Investment in Northern Ireland in general has been very low. That is another aspect one would need to account for if one looked at the Northern economy and in terms of trying to push this forward. Human capital in education is the most important investment we can make. The second most important would be various kinds of infrastructure. We would need to increase that level of investment and that, de facto, would mean that subvention would have to increase to address the shortfall. That goes into various types of infrastructure such as roads. There are some major issues in Northern Ireland.

For example, if one tries to get from the second largest city to the largest, the infrastructure is not very good, and one could point to lots of other examples. Making up that shortfall will take a long time and a lot of money.