Professor Seamus McGuinness:

The constraint is the block grant. That is the issue. To match FE outputs in the Republic, vocational education's provision in the North will probably have to travel because 10% of people out of Northern Ireland have vocational qualifications compared with 30% in Ireland. The questions then are how many new FE colleges are needed, what the expansion is, where to put them and how much that costs. As regards the development of an infrastructural network in terms of the real network, we are looking at some change coming through over the next ten years. As regards infrastructure policy, as Professor Doyle pointed out, the main barrier is probably political instability and uncertainty, and there are lots of intangibles there. That is not something that cannot be addressed by economists but it would have to be addressed to get the industrial policy side of the equation right as well, so it is-----