Dr. Seamus McGuinness:

As Dr. Barrett explained, it is fundamentally the case that when we look at Northern Ireland in the context of the regions of Great Britain, it was historically a region of high unemployment. When I worked in Belfast, industrial policy was always aimed at expanding employment and cutting unemployment. At the same time, educational attainment has been rising. It is not that the workers are less productive, but that the workers should become more productive because they have more education and skills than they had in the past. If the objective of industrial policy is simply to expand employment, and if we do not really check the quality of the jobs coming in, the average quality of the jobs will fall over time.