Dr. Tom McDonnell:

On childcare, as the Deputy will know, Ireland and Great Britain have some of the highest childcare costs in the world as a percentage of average income, which is a huge problem. One also has a childcare sector that does not make sense for the workers. There is a very high level of churn in that sector. It does not even necessarily work for businesses themselves. As we have a form of market failure where we have a bad outcome for everybody, a larger role for the State will be required.

We know that caring will over the next 20 years be one of the growing sectors of employment. As an ageing population will by itself require that, we need to get to a place where caring is a valued and recognised profession and that churn is no longer there. Is it sustainable to have high rates of pay and a profitable business at the same time? Very possibly not. Again, the State needs to play a larger direct role in caring.

On the activity and inactivity piece, the high cost of childcare and a lack of availability of childcare are obviously direct causal factors in lower activity rates for certain groups such as, for example, lone parents but also sometimes second earners. Obviously there is a hugely gendered impact here as well. Solving the childcare issue is crucial within that particular debate.

Obviously housing issues affect the ability to attract inward migration but it also affects migration within the island itself. That leads to lower employment rates and higher levels of inactivity because people simply cannot move to Dublin, Galway or wherever. One may also be in a location where those jobs are not congruent with a person's skill set, which is problematic.

On the childcare piece, reforms in terms of flexible hours, days and location of work help to ameliorate the problems caused by the lack of availability and the cost of childcare.

On devolving corporation tax, it is important to understand why it worked for the Republic of Ireland. The reality is that those corporation tax policies have evolved over more than 60 years. They have gone through a number of phases. In many cases a lot of the major, huge named companies that the Deputy would know of have been here since the 1990s or the early 2000s when different corporation tax policies were allowed and when there was a lot less attention on what the Republic of Ireland was doing. Now, as part of the OECD process, those behaviours have been clamped down on to a large extent and to be fair, the Republic of Ireland does not necessarily engage in those practices as it did in the past. In the 2020s and 2030, with a minimum of 15% effective corporation tax rate, it is not possible for Northern Ireland to do the types of things that the Republic of Ireland did in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. Consequently, it would not be this silver bullet that would help the economy. As Mr. Mac Flynn has said, the lower corporation tax rate, if it were fully devolved, would in the immediate few years lead to a reduction of tax revenues, which would mean less money for public services, infrastructure and all of those things. It may actually turn out to be a bit of a disaster.

We have seen some states in the US having to reverse tax cuts that had been implemented on the assumption they would pay for themselves. Tax cuts very rarely pay for themselves. There may be some temporal exceptions based on specific circumstances but I do not believe that will be the answer to getting those big FDI companies into Northern Ireland. The Republic of Ireland was really lucky because of its timing. When it became part of the Single Market, a lot of US multinationals parachuted into the country to benefit from being within that market. There were low taxes, low wage rates, high levels of unemployment and a lot of other advantages. Those companies are there now and it is unlikely that historical accident will be repeated. It is unlikely those policies would be as successful, or indeed successful at all, for Northern Ireland.