Professor John Doyle:

My understanding of the IIEA report is that there was no economic modelling done for a figure. I know from Professor John Fitzgerald's previous public talks that he has talked about the length of time it took from the introduction of free secondary education to the sort of economic growth in the 1990s and that is where the 20-odd years came from. However, lots of other things happened in the middle as well. Obviously, the European Single Market did not exist until 1992, to start with. Obviously Northern Ireland would rejoin the Single Market as soon as it joined a united Ireland. That has been agreed with the European Council. The biggest single difference today is that of the students from Northern Ireland who go to study in England, Scotland or Wales, two thirds do not come home. Those who are there for a long time might be well settled and will not come home but those who are only there for a couple of years might return. The experience in Ireland when we had periods of economic boom was that lots of recent migrants came home if there were good jobs available. The call of home was strong and I suspect it would also be thus in Northern Ireland. That means creating a link between investing in education and industrial policy, as Professor McGuinness and Dr. Bergin said. Probably the biggest single thing a future US administration might do is not so much write a cheque - although nobody would hand it back - but to persuade some international companies that might consider investing in Northern Ireland, with a nudge factor from the White House, to do so, with the assurance that while graduates might not be available right here and now, there are people who could be persuaded back home if the right sorts of jobs were there with the right sorts of wages. There are lots of levers we could model out that do not involve changing the education system, starting with kindergarten, which will take 20-odd years to get the graduates. There are much faster policy levers that would lead to a different outcome.