Professor John FitzGerald:

I hope Professor Doyle earns 10% more. He is certainly 10% more productive.

It is a matter of being able to attract people back. Ireland was a boring place in the 1950s and 1960s when I grew up. What jizzed it up? Well, part of it was foreigners coming in, and there were also the people who returned back with a different view of the world that they had developed from outside. The transformation of Irish society as a result of EU membership is important.

On the point of living longer, one of the factors is education. I have a paper with a former colleague, Nuša Žnuderl, in 2013, where we looked at the Republic. It is really horrifying that the life expectancy of people who have left school early is dramatically lower. In particular, this is the case for males between the ages of 20 and 40, where there can be violent deaths or non-natural deaths. Part of this is education but part of the reason they left school early may have been because they had other mental health problems etc. It is true that life expectancy is substantially improved if you have a good education. Part of the difference in life expectancy between North and South is the different levels of educational attainment of the population aged over 40.