Dr. Alan Barrett:

One of the frustrations is that many politicians in Northern Ireland have a sense of what the roadmap is in the context of improvements in a range of areas. The funding difficulties they have in Northern Ireland, especially because they do not have the capacity to raise their own revenues, is one issue. They are reliant on the block grant. That really is just consumed, with health taking more than 50% of it. The scope they have to make investments is currently very limited. The other difficulty is the siloed nature of the various Departments and the mandatory coalition that just makes collaboration a little bit more difficult. However, if the committee talks to civil servants in Northern Ireland, which I am sure it has, in some ways they look at the South - I am going back 20 years - when there was considerable knowledge transfer at the time between Ireland and the accession states of the European Union. There was considerable interest in coming here and learning what we were doing and how we were using EU money. The folks in Northern Ireland know all of this. The blockages to advancement are probably more internal. To the extent that the big issue around the subvention is, as we have been discussing, poor economic outcomes in Northern Ireland, it is very difficult for the Government in the South to have an impact on that. By far, the greatest impact is in Northern Ireland and, possibly, London.