Dr. Tom McDonnell:

I do. My colleagues in the North and I have developed a paper focusing on what a new economic model South and North could look like, obviously with similar policies in both. Good policies are good policies generally. As for analysing what these coming megatrends are going to look like, deglobalisation of course is the one we are talking about here. There are also the ageing demographics, artificial intelligence, digitalisation, deglobalisation, decarbonisation - all of these things - but also land wars and Covid-19. How do we insulate our economy? How do we ensure that we are antifragile in the sense that, no matter what happens, we can potentially thrive and flourish regardless because we will have built our economy in such a way that it is resilient to these type of shocks?

We have attempted to build a model based upon four pillars: productivity, more and better jobs, economic security and economic resilience. Within each of those threads, which are complementary, there is a policy suite to get to that place. For example, research and development, R&D, is a classic one that we have not really done in the Republic or in the North. How can we deal with the underspends on education? Is this a false economy longer term? There are the points about infrastructure and golden rules. How can we reform social insurance in order that people have time to find a new job rather than taking the first job but also preventing a crash, if there is a recession, so that people have income protection that allows the economy to get through that? There is also utilisation of national training funds to provide on-the-job training. All these measures are good for companies as well.

On the productivity side, it is about emphasising that. That is what the high-road model looks like. Workers often ask whether productivity means just working harder. Rather, it is about giving workers better tools, whether that is equipment, skills or knowledge, to do the job better or to do different types of jobs. That is what productivity really is, rather than the low-road model, or the London model if you will, which was about bringing costs as low as possible and gaining competitiveness that way. The diversity of the economy comes from that. It ends up with a diverse economy. On minimum wages, funnily enough, a minimum wage forces companies to up their game so it actually does kill very unproductive jobs. However, over a longer term, and this is what the Nordics often did, it pushes companies to be more productive, albeit over decades. There is a lot in this. It is about changing how we think about economic development. For what it is worth, it would be applicable in any European country, frankly.

In dealing with this volatility, it is clear we have a very concentrated economy in the South. The statistics show that just two sectors, pharmaceuticals and digital services, represent an enormous percentage of the economy. If anything were to happen to either of those, it would look like Ireland has had a massive recession. It would not necessarily have the employment impact but it would look devastating. We have not successfully developed a strong domestic enterprise base. Understanding why we have not been able to do that relates to the productivity piece. This is not a trade unions or workers versus business issue. It is actually something that benefits both sides longer term. We have been attempting to break out those policies and those documents are now going up on our website. We would be very happy to talk about them in greater specifics in whatever forum. We certainly intend to do that. We have been working on this for the past two years, but we are getting there now.