Professor John FitzGerald:

When I looked at the history, I was amazed that Northern Ireland had an awful 1920s and 1930s and that the Republic of Ireland grew faster than the North during that period. It was the Second World War that transformed the Northern economy. Regarding where Northern Ireland really missed out, it was doing reasonably well in the 1960s and then along came the Troubles and EU membership. The Republic of Ireland embraced EU membership. The adjustment was difficult but it built an economy round that where Northern Ireland missed out on 20 years. It is very difficult to replace those 20 years.

On inward investment, corporation tax was important in terms of growth up to 2000.

However, since then, it is education that counts. If the corporation tax rate disappeared, we would lose much tax revenue but we would lose very few jobs. George Quigley, whom I really respected and who was the Northern Ireland equivalent of T.K. Whitaker, was very much of the view that corporation tax was the answer for Northern Ireland. It might have been an answer 30 years ago but it is not today. Today, it is education. A paper for the Department for the Economy by Iulia Siedschlag on how one will not get valuable foreign direct investment unless one has the third level graduates is important.

Finally, on labour force participation, that is also related to education. Research I have done on the Republic shows that one third of the Celtic tiger was generated by women. Women, on average, were better educated than men traditionally in Ireland. My wife says they were clever. They were better educated but they were not in the labour force. Suddenly the economy woke up and said we need them. One third of the Celtic tiger resulted from women participating in the labour force who had good skills and good education and were not being exploited. Perhaps that is an issue for Northern Ireland, though I am not sure.