Professor John Doyle:

One of the things we are doing at DCU with colleagues in Ulster University is taking on from the work of Professor McGuinness and Dr. Bergin on the technical and quantitative aspects. We are doing a follow-up, more qualitative piece of work, talking to policymakers, people who make decisions around state aid, officials who try to bring business to the island of Ireland, North and South, and companies that decided to come South but did not decide to go North. What was their decision-making basis? Why did they pick Ireland rather than Slovenia? Why did they pick Cork rather than Belfast? We are only halfway through it, so it is very tentative. However, the drivers are clear. One official, who is 40 years working for a State agency in investment, said not once in 40 years was Northern Ireland a competition. He said there was almost no city in Europe that was not a competition once for a factory or an investment, but never Northern Ireland. They said it was political stability, market stability, graduate numbers and tax was number four. It was really consistent. Normally, with qualitative research, you get a scatter. I have never come across a piece of research like this, even though we are only at the halfway stage. What they are telling us could all be wrong, of course, but they all believe the same things.

One person told me that from the point of view of an American company, we are heading into an election, but they did not see things radically change for them as a company depending on who was in power in Dublin. Regarding the various political parties, they thought Sinn Féin might increase their personal taxes by a couple of percent, but probably not the corporation tax rate. CEOs are generally on over €100,000, so they were in target for it. Nobody wants to pay more tax, but they did not care. They saw it as a stable market inside the EU. It is stable market-wise and stable political-wise. They asked us who is making the decision when you talk about going to Belfast. Is it the Executive? You can get your head around that. Is it a civil servant who has no authority to talk to you at all and is afraid to move outside the strict rules of the game because they have no authority to do so, or is it a Minister in London? That is a radically different scenario. If you are making a ten-year investment, which of those people will be deciding what is facing Intel or Meta in eight years’ time? There is a political and market stability in the South that simply does not exist in Northern Ireland. I would not be surprised when we get to December and finish our report if we complement Dr. Bergin’s and Professor McGuinness's point of view and say that those intangible perception issues are why foreign direct investment in Northern Ireland is about 20% of the level in the South when you allow for population. Wage levels in foreign direct companies in Northern Ireland are lower than average rather than higher, which is not the case almost everywhere in western Europe. Multinationals pay well, by and large. There might be other issues but they by and large pay well, although they do not in Northern Ireland.