Professor John FitzGerald:

In the case of a kid who is 15 and at GCSE level, if that kid is kept for another two or three years in school and maybe, even better, they go onto third level, it will be seven or eight years before the kid enters the labour market. This problem has been going on for a century in Northern Ireland. Before they reach 40 and half of the people who have been failed by the system have been replaced, that will be another 20 years. We have seen that with the investment in the Republic. Free education began in 1967. The first free cohort was in 1968 or 1969 and participation then built up slowly. Hopefully it would be built up very rapidly in the North. We had to build schools, which took time, and then they moved up through the system.

I have modelled this and there are nine papers on this subject, all of which look at it. There is a paper by Joe Durkan, Doireann FitzGerald, my daughter, and Colm Harmon from 1999 that looked at this. They estimated the benefits of education added about 20% of the growth in the 1990s. It is much higher in the 2000s because it takes time for that to build up, until the kids who have been educated move up through the system. Out of my cohort in their 70s - I am pre-free education - only one eighth went on to university, while 40% or 50% of my generation left school early. They are all retired now, so that benefit took time. Education takes time.