Professor Edgar Morgenroth:

Our paper started out looking at broadband, but we then decided to examine not just broadband but also education and a lot of other infrastructure.

We considered start-ups and attracting foreign direct investment. The study is now published in the Journal of Regional Science, which is a top international journal. We found that education is just so much more important. We also found that without a high level of skills in an area, broadband is a waste of money because people need to have the skills to use it. The two aspects complement each other; they are not substitutes. Just investing in broadband is not really going to get a good return, particularly if there is a low level of human capital in the first place. That leads to the point the Deputy made on how a skills base can be generated in the more rural areas. This is clearly an area in which the institutes of technology, or technological universities, as they are now going to be called, can play a particular role.

As Professor FitzGerald mentioned, cross-Border collaboration between Letterkenny and Derry and Ulster University seemed like an obvious thing to do. It is a question of how to do it. The Deputy mentioned this. There is now a Department responsible for higher education so it may be time that we came up with a strategy. This is positive. It has nothing to do with one's political persuasion. In general, educational investment is a no-regrets policy regardless of the community one comes from. Therefore, we should really maximise this. To some extent, however, we have to realise that some of the institutes of technology and universities are competing. We are all looking for student numbers. Again, that is something to bear in mind when thinking about how to deal with this.

It was noticeable the last time I looked, although I have not looked for a while, that while we might have low numbers of university students crossing the Border, the numbers are much more pronounced for institutes of technology. I looked at the figures for Dundalk at one point and saw a very small number crossed the Border. There was pretty much nobody crossing from the South to the North. That is quite striking and probably not very good.