Mr. Stephen Kelly:

I will start by answering an earlier question about the common travel area and labour mobility on the island. The common travel area is incredibly helpful and incredibly useful, certainly for somebody like me who lives half a mile from the Border. The Border is a fundamental part of my life. It was designed in the 1920s for an Ireland and indeed a UK that no longer exist. We are incredibly diverse countries. We have welcomed people who have enriched us with their own culture as well as their labour in recent decades. Those people do not share the same rights and benefits under the common travel area as I do as someone born here. It may scare the life out of the Department of Foreign Affairs or others in government, but is it time to review the common travel area so that it is more reflective of the island of Ireland as it is today and indeed these two islands as we find them today?

It seems ridiculous to me. My wife is a daily communicant who goes to Mass every morning. There is a Filipino priest who serves in the local chapel in Derry. They were doing a bus trip into Donegal and the priest could not go. I wondered what was going on there. It is because of the migration issue post Brexit. He does not have the right to go and therefore did not take the risk. The same thing is happening on both sides of the Border relating to schoolchildren on school trips. I know it sounds like nonsense and is not the biggest economic issue in the world. However, it is a really important issue for individuals and what it says about this being an open welcoming place for people to come and make a contribution to civic and economic life. Maybe now is the time to try to find the original document, dust it off and make it fit for purpose for the island we have now North and South and for the UK as it stands.

We suffer from a lack of availability of labour. Many of our businesses which are headquartered in the North have facilities in the South. Just moving people between those two facilities has become incredibly difficult. One of the largest pharmaceutical firms in the North works on a cross-Border basis. It is constantly trying to do a kind of 3D jigsaw to try to work out which members of staff can actually go and support work in other parts of its business elsewhere on the island. This is down to some of them not being an Irish or UK national and not having the rights under the common travel area. It is a big issue and something that needs further exploration not just by this committee but by this House. It is a potential piece of work for the Department of Foreign Affairs or others.

Deputy Wynne asked about those who are economically inactive. Mr. Neill is right that one in four of people in the North who are aged between 16 and 65 are economically inactive. We have an increasingly positive picture of that cohort of people in that the number is reducing all the time. I tweeted about it last night. I encourage people to look at our Twitter account, @ManufacturingNI, where they will get all the statistics from an academic at Ulster University on this.

We cannot simply say that one in four people who are economically inactive would be available for the workforce because they would not be. Some people have disabilities or are at stages where they just cannot work. Never mind people with minor levels of disabilities who have challenges there, there are also people who cannot work because of caring responsibilities. There are a whole raft of reasons some of these people are just not available for the workforce. There is a rough example. About one quarter of that one quarter would potentially be in a position to actually take up some work. It is a big challenge for us in the North.

When employers looked at the economically inactive, they found the cost of bringing someone through to a productive place in the workforce to be ten times what it would have been to engage in the UK's migration regime and bring someone from English-speaking nations such as South Africa, the Philippines or India.

That route has now been taken away, so employers need to step up and think differently about how they manage bringing into the workforce people who are probably the farthest away from it at this point.

At the core of the question around wages for information and communication technology being the highest in Clare - I suggest it is the same across the island - Ireland's economic future is about increasing the well-being of the people who are here. That comes from people in work earning more money. It is a simple equation. However, as regards getting where we need to be - as productive an economy as possible - from the North's perspective, we have a productivity problem which is largely driven by two things. One is that we have too many civil and public servants. Almost one third of the workforce works directly for the Government. The second is that we have too many small farms. They are allowed to be there and continue to be there because of policy choices. They have benefits outside economic benefits. It leaves the rest of us to ask what we need to do to make our businesses more productive.

If you drive productivity up, you drive wealth into the business and that wealth is shared with people in supply chains and so forth. We need to meet that productivity challenge. The biggest barrier to that is the quality of the people who are leaving businesses. We are trying to ensure that our manufacturing leaders - I am sure it is the same for my colleagues in other industries - not only get training and become skilled but also go and explore good leadership in other manufacturing businesses. That is happening across the island. We bring manufacturing leaders together at least once a year. Equally, we are running programmes with InterTradeIreland where we are sharing knowledge and experience on a cross-Border basis on leadership positions. Leaders are the most important tool in a business, because they drive the rest of the business, including where the investment goes, the strategic direction and the culture in the organisation that allows people to contribute more. If that can be improved, we will be well on our way to improving our productivity.

The final question was around cost pressures and competition. I already mentioned that we have the second most expensive energy market in Europe. That needs to be addressed. It is in everyone's interest, including homeowners, not only factory owners. We are an island situated off an island that is situated off a continent. We are at the beginning and end of every supply chain. That comes, by the force of gravity and geography, with additional costs. It is not only the cost of energy; it is the cost of transportation and how we design the economy we have. We are not in the business of making low-value items. We need to be at a much higher part of the value stream as regards what we make and sell internationally. Second, it is about trying to sell more internationally. We are a small island. It is a decent sized economy, but we need to extend what we sell into markets overseas, to bring good hard clean cash back to the island, which will be to the benefit of us all.