Professor John Doyle:

I would credit a colleague of mine in DCU, Professor Edgar Morgenroth, who often writes with Professor FitzGerald, for pointing out what is almost a statistical anomaly in European economies whereby second cities tend to be about half of the size of the capital city. There is no rhyme no or reason for why that is true in many respects and it is just a random statistical quirk. However, there is a sort of underlying reason. Capital cities outgrow themselves but small cities are maybe not quite big enough for the Googles of the world, which want to be somewhere where they can employ 5,000 people, not 500. Professor Fitzgerald pointed earlier to the impossibility from an IDA point of view of satisfying ministerial pressure to bring investment to smaller towns. However socially desirable it might be, the companies were not interested and they just did not see that they could find the range of skills they needed at that scale. Beyond Cork, we have had some successes but we have struggled to get a more balanced regional economy. Deputy Conway-Walsh talked about the west and the north-west in particular, and Limerick over the years has struggled, despite an upward swing more recently.

The Belfast region has a complementary experience to Dublin's. It was bigger than Dublin at the time of partition and one calculation is that 80% of GDP was in the four north-eastern counties of modern Northern Ireland, and it has an engineering tradition, so it is not like we are just dividing up the same jobs differently. It is a different sort of scale and it is big enough to be interesting to a big multinational coming in. However, at the moment, in terms of the research we are doing, from talking to Google and others in Dublin, they know rental rates in Belfast are about 45% of what they have to pay at Grand Canal Dock and various other places, wage levels are lower and they have some sort of expectation that maybe they could attract graduates back from England or Scotland, and some are available locally, but not a single one of them has actually made the move.

I am not saying that there has been no investment, but none of those large companies has decided it can reduce its costs dramatically by moving two hours away. The reasons for this are complex, but with a different policy or constitutional framework in place, Belfast would have a scale that Cork, Limerick and Galway did not. In this way, it would be complementary to Dublin as opposed to Dublin losing out. It provides a larger labour market and expertise with which to attract companies.

In terms of the public sector, most of the evidence suggests that congestion was the single largest reason that the European Medicines Agency, despite nearly coming to Ireland, decided not to. Housing and education were also considerations. On every other score, we probably had it marginally. If that was the case for a quasi-public sector agency, how much more so would it be for a large Silicon Valley company that could not see where employees would come from and live, especially if it was bringing in multilingual workers from abroad? It would look at the Daft.ie website and see that housing was not available at a level at which it was willing to pay salaries.

This is the complementary and hopeful piece. I accept Professor FitzGerald’s comments about the economic challenges. They are real, so it is a matter of getting on a trajectory that could meet them.

Probably the single largest impact of partition has been in the north west between Donegal and Derry. It has been equally impactful on both sides of the Border. Derry is a large city on the island of Ireland, but it is almost non-existent in terms of student numbers in my own sector, that of higher education. To companies, Derry does not look like the kind of smaller city at home where they can pick up graduates and, therefore, it has struggled to attract investment. The Derry-Strabane area has low incomes by European standards, not just by standards on the island of Ireland. It could be an attractive offering, but any sort of order has a regulatory impact on a company. For example, migration policy has had an impact on Derry recently in terms of trying to get spousal visas. Getting visas for employees has been okay and someone might want to move to Derry, but if his or her spouse has a job in Letterkenny, they need two visas. The UK is not keen on a visa for someone who is working in Letterkenny, though. That is not how these visas are supposed to work. It is difficult to foresee short-term non-political solutions to these problems. It is not just a case of a technical fix addressing them easily. In another context, though, the situation would be different.

Professor FitzGerald is right to point out the challenges and I do not dispute them, but I would swing more towards the optimistic end of the spectrum, as there are prospects that would make a significant change.