Professor John FitzGerald:

On migration, when I was in college in the late sixties, there were a load of students from Northern Ireland all on grants. They were really well-off but they all went back to the North. Before Independence, very few people from the north came to the south or vice versa, and that has not changed. There is amazingly little migration between the North and the South. As regards the movement of graduates, it is kids who leave school with A-levels who go to England. They do not come to the Republic to go to university, predominantly. They go to England, not Scotland - I had thought it was Scotland - and two thirds of them do not come back. The study on that shows that they are predominantly from the unionist community and do not go back to Northern Ireland. It is a huge potential asset. Our kids go abroad. I have three daughters currently living abroad but they are homing pigeons that come back. I hope two will come home this year. The research shows that such people have helped make this economy grow more rapidly. Returned emigrants bring something back. Northern Ireland has lost out on that. If it could persuade such graduates in successful jobs in England and Wales to come back to Northern Ireland, there would be a reasonably rapid increase in productivity from that.

On the issue of the early school leavers, the Vani Borooah and Colin Knox study published in 2015 is a very detailed study of education in Northern Ireland. Vani was the leading academic economist in Northern Ireland for 20 to 30 years. He showed that it is because of the breakdown between grammar schools and secondary schools that 60% of kids are failed at the age of 11. The 11-plus is gone but what is in its place is possibly worse. Kids from a working-class or disadvantage background nearly all go to the secondary schools. Vani showed that 40% of kids from a unionist background and 30% from a Catholic background drop out early. He estimated from what he called a Catholic ethos advantage that working-class kids from a Catholic background did better. He did not know whether it was because the schools were better or whether it was because of parental expectations. My suspicion is that parental expectations are the reason. Whatever the reason, kids are failed at the age of 11, go into a school, which may be a very good one, and will not progress from it. They will leave school early. It should be remembered that free education came in in 1967. It took five or ten years to build out the schools and so on. Kids are kept two years longer in secondary school and then they progress to third level. That is what happened with us. There are ten years or maybe five years while the education system is being changed. Those kids are still in the education system for another five or seven years, so productivity begins to be affected only after 15 years. It is only after they have all replaced the elderly generation, my generation, that we will have the full productivity effects. If there is reform tomorrow, it will be 20 or 30 years before there will be a big productivity effect from that, but we could get a bigger productivity effect if we could attract back graduates from Britain. They come back and get a faster response.

Deputy Conway-Walsh raised the issue of efficiency gains. Peter Hain, in one of his last speeches as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, in 2006, at the MacGill Summer School, went through the huge costs in Northern Ireland because towns have a Catholic and a Protestant secondary and grammar school, four schools. If they were to be boiled into one, there would be huge savings. There are other ways of saving money in Northern Ireland.

I have not broken down the cost of re-rating the social welfare payments. I have bundled that in with the cost of raising public sector pay rates in Northern Ireland to the same as in the Republic. That is where the €10 billion comes from. It is the two together. It is probably more 60:40 pay to social welfare, but I would have to go back and look at the detailed figures on that.

Professor Morgenroth will deal with the benefits of the all-island economy.