Dr. Alan Barrett:

We touched on this a little bit earlier. We think about this as a plan in the style of the national development plans that have been rolled out in the Republic over the years since the mid-1990s and probably even before. This was very often in the context of European money being made available. Expenditures needed to be set out across a whole range of areas. Everybody thinks of roads, wastewater treatment plants and all of those sorts of major infrastructure, which are all really important for an economy to function well, but a lot of European money went into things like higher and further education. It is about the notion of a very integrated strategy. For a variety of reasons, there has not been that sort of integrated strategy in Northern Ireland for quite a while. Even at a much more basic level, you always want a government to have a programme for government so that it has a roadmap and an agreed set of principles to pursue. However, because of the on-off nature of the Executive over quite a long period, there has not even been a programme for government in place. That causes real complications because, apart from the difficulties from a policy formulation point of view, to return to the point Dr. Bergin made earlier when we were talking about a culture of evaluation, it is very hard to evaluate how a government is doing when, for example, trying to assess the annual budget if there is no benchmark against which to decide whether it is doing a good job. It all goes back to the issue of integrated policy. To a certain extent, precisely what is done is almost a second order issue compared to the first notion of a high-level integrated approach to all these things in which you think of all the levers of policy that should be working together to achieve the sorts of outcomes you want.