Mr. Michael D'Arcy:

Being a sportsman, I take that as a challenge and my response had better be good. In case I did not mention it earlier, I should say that the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is the supporter of this study. It was commissioned by the CCBS and it is important to put that on the record. When I was preparing this presentation and the fact that it was to be made to the Joint Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement, I reread the Agreement, particularly the declaration at the start of it. I took note of the wording of what was the task of the Agreement and I give a few selected references from it. It states: "We are committed to partnership ... between North and South" and "we will endeavour to strive in every practical way towards reconciliation and ... agreed arrangements". In responding to the questions, I would like members to keep that sense of agreed arrangements in the back of their minds as to what this committee and politicians in general can do. Ultimately, when one talks about public service provision, one is talking about matters which are under the discretion of politicians and of Ministers in exercising power. If we are to have two jurisdictions co-operating with each other, we need agreed arrangements. In terms of the "what can we do?" question, which is always the first one that should be tackled, agreed arrangements are perhaps a good starting point.

I was just talking to Michelle Gildernew about the question of health and health insurance and I will start by dealing with that question. We are talking about the NHS and the HSE in any agreed arrangements. I am often amused when those in the South talk about economies of scale. If we think about the NHS and about the HSE, the economies of scale are the other way around. The benefits from this jurisdiction plugging into the NHS is to plug into those economies of scale, as they are deployed within Northern Ireland. That is the perspective to which we need to get used.

The question of insurance goes to the heart of the matter when we think of what we insure against and it is against the occurrence of a catastrophe. My life is insured. When one talk about health insurance, there are two aspects. One is if something goes wrong and the other is the payment mechanism when one is getting something done. If one thinks about both, co-operation, or even co-ordination, will not be enough. These arrangements will include collaboration. When something goes wrong, it cannot be a case of: "Would you like to look into that, please?" People have to come and work together to figure out how this can done.

In a Border context, are there different arrangements for different parts of the Border? This is a point Michelle Gildernew raised. Is there one arrangement in Enniskillen hospital, another in Altnagelvin hospital and another in Daisy Hill Hospital? How does that make sense? The arrangements must be co-ordinated and coherent between all the facilities. That is the only agreed arrangement that fundamentally makes sense, namely, that some basic principles would guide the application of the insurance right along the Border. What was mentioned in the Compton report in this respect? It was the fact that there happen to be three acute hospitals in the Border region on the Northern side of the Border whereas they do not have a mirror in the South. The acute hospitals are further south. For the convenience of people in the Border regions, tapping into that economy of scale makes a good deal of sense. The Compton report is interesting in the sense that it allowed for the possibility that around Daisy Hill, unless patients were coming from the South to it, it would not maintain its position in terms of economies of scale within the Northern system. That is a real challenge and opportunity in the South to put the agreed arrangements in place that would make that happen.

What is the role of politics and politicians in this? It is to sit on that in a way, to keep asking the questions whether we should have those arrangements, where they are, how we can put them in place and how they should happen. We are not the experts, we need to be given the answers and then we can evaluate. That is the reason this forum is so important because the members bring both sides of that equation together. If we were in the other committee rooms with just the public health forum operating in the South, we would get only side of the equation. Here we have the opportunity to bring the two sides together and to seek co-ordination and coherence between them in terms of all along the Border and not just in the middle, the north west or wherever. That is an interesting question but these are tough challenges and they are complex. If one were to ask administrators to do this, they would have a lot of work to do. I will come back to that question in terms of the administration and what that might involve.

The benefits are clearly evident. If one looks from the top down, in terms of the element of the health budget that is within the discretion of the Northern Ireland Administration, if economies are scale are dependent upon usage, then across the health system there are benefits form acute hospitals down to centres catering for specialist conditions. If one decides to set up centres to cater for specialist conditions on this island, be it cardiac care, a very rare form of cancer and let us say there are 100 sufferers, on the law of averages, ten of those will be in the North and 90 will be in South. There is a choice for the patient and his or her family. If the specialist centre is set up in the South, the choice is if they wish to have treatment in London, Liverpool or Manchester whereby they would have to board a plane or boat or if they wish to get into a car and drive North and vice versa. A centre of excellence is being developed in Belfast, involving Queen's University and Belfast City Hospital around cancer care. Is there a benefit in the South in being able to plug into a UK centre of excellence by driving in a car for the two and half hours to the North instead of boarding a plane or a boat? These are the practical issues that need to be injected by politicians into the more complex challenges of the two entities, which are engaged in enormous internal reform process and have many other things on their mind. Unless this is pushed, I fear it will not happen.

Another way this can happen is through communities. General practitioner services are driven by patients. As I understand it, the NHS is moving towards a more GP-paid-by-patient model, more like the model we have here. That puts the power somewhat into the patients' hands. If communities in the Border regions can come together to drive this again from a bottom-up approach, that would be helpful as well.

In terms of the study, it is proposed that someone should put forward a plan to do this. There should be a plan somewhere. If one wants to implement something, one needs a plan. Who will be responsible for that, where is the plan, how can it be done, what are the issues around it, what are the costs involved and what are the benefits? Those are the practical suggestions made in the study.

I will move on to tourism and the issues raised were interesting. All the conversations I had were informal - Chatham House rules. There was a sense that we have structure in that Tourism Ireland sells Ireland across the world and invites people to come to Ireland and in that way it increases its share of the pie. We also have Fáilte Ireland and the Northern Ireland Tourist Board and they compete for their share of the pie. Structurally, one might say that is not optimal. In answer to the specific question of how do we get around that, my practical suggestion was to ask can we move beyond the agencies to the people in the field, the providers of tourism products and services. I thought back to the late 1980s. Unfortunately, I can go back that far. For a long time the tourism industry had depended on coach tours from UK and there was a desire to increase tourism from the Continent. The industry commissioned research and asked people on the Continent what they wanted, what would bring them here in the first instance, and what would have to be invest in to provide an experience that would be worthwhile for them to travel here. It is time to go back and think about that.

The scenery is beautiful but what will someone from Beijing, for example, want to do there? What would bring them to those lakes as distinct from lakes elsewhere in Europe? We should think about the G8 summit in that context because if it is on Chinese television, that is one of the few opportunities one gets to be on mainstream Chinese television. My proposal for the people in Fermanagh, Sligo and north Leitrim is that they should not just wait. The community should mobilise and consider that ahead of the event. They should identify the gap, go to the agencies and ask them to do some research to find out if this could be more broadly popular in that market.

That leads me to the next question on the Border development zone. The concept of a Border development zone was first proposed by Mr. Padraic White at a conference run by Andy Pollak, and it is so self-evidently worthwhile it is something one could think might happen. I got some push back in the research from a policy perspective, however, in terms of the danger of creating another special region. There is always a risk to that. The Shannon Development region is now being wound up 30 years later because it passed its purpose. There are also the Gaeltacht regions. There is always a risk in creating specialist regions. I suggested taking another step and pushing this out to the communities. What do the 1 million people - Mr. White did the mathematics - who live within 20 miles of each side of the Border share? They share two peripheralities. They share regional peripherality within both jurisdictions and they share the peripherality of being on a border between the two jurisdictions. In terms of anything that requires a decision at the centre in Belfast or Dublin that has universal effect, why not mobilise universally to get that decision made?

In terms of health services, why talk about a particular case in Altnagelvin hospital which is different from Enniskillen hospital or Daisy Hill Hospital? All the groups around the Border should have a common set of principles and say to both centres that this is what is needed in the Border region. I pushed it back, so to speak.

I was talking to Mr. Pollak during the break. The centre will launch a series of scoping studies to drill down more deeply in terms of the implementation of the zone, but regardless of the number of studies done, local leaders must come together to bring it forward. Looking around this room, obviously representatives of the Border region play an important role in sending signals. Politicians can always send critical signals to their constituents and their communities. This is important. We must step outside the local and see what we share in common if this zone is to work, and these are the issues we can work on collectively around the region.

Economically, there are major distinctions. The north west is one type of economy. What is Derry doing in terms of stepping up to the plate and being the economic hub of that north-west region? In the mid-Border region there is no urban centre. It is completely peripheral and therefore people have to work harder. The eastern corridor is between Dublin and Belfast. There are the two economic poles and the motorway, and all the literature tells us that motorways can act as a powerful development tool.

If we look outside of the area, the centre commissioned a very good study from John Bradley and Mike Best that examined business in the Border region. Again, that is taking advantage of the Border in setting up logistical services to serve the island from the Border region with the new transport network. There are opportunities in that regard. On one site a cluster of specialist food companies is developing. This is where we need to go in the future in terms of enterprise development.

In terms of transport, I have driven to the north west - the missing link. One drives to Galway and it is transformed. I live in Terenure. I am ten minutes from the Spawell roundabout and then all of the island, except the north west, is available to me. I used to show a map of the railway infrastructure in 1920 and it covered the entire island, and if one looks at it today, it has a big gap also. A good question for people in the north west to ask themselves is which north west are we talking about. Is it just Donegal or the broader north west? That is a real challenge and is something I hope will be corrected because it is an infrastructure gap that needs to be filled.

In regard to local roads, that is the legacy of history. Again, it is about agreed arrangements. Can agreed arrangements be put in place in terms of the local authorities, the National Roads Authority and the Northern Ireland counterpart to fix those problems? If there are traffic jams due to more economic activity and interaction between the communities, that builds the case. Demand should drive the necessity to upgrade the roads infrastructure. If members can show a progressive demand, that will probably help but, ultimately, agreed arrangements are what will be needed. Someone must allocate the budget to spend the money and it must be obtained from the two centres. That is the real challenge.

Coming back to administration, I am not talking about the joint secretariat in Armagh that essentially has become the experts in North-South interaction. It is almost like a centre of excellence in that regard. In terms of a manager in the broader public administration being given a job that involves North-South engagement, it is a risk. It is outside the day job. We do not normally engage with someone from the other jurisdiction, and it is different from going to Brussels. In Brussels, one is engaging with 27 other member states. It is a big process and a big machine. One has been geared up for it. One has got training and coaching. It is a different experience to jump into a car and drive to Belfast to meet one's counterpart in a Northern Ireland department, especially if it is on an issue outside the agreements and there is not someone from the joint secretariat present.

Being practical about it, there is no real incentive in that regard. Does one get an extra star on one's performance measurement by either Administration in recognition of it? Is one given any extra credit for it? One of our practical recommendations is that there should be a handbook and more support given generally across the system if implementation is to work. Politics and politicians have an important role to show the systems that this is important and that it must be recognised. If they ask for the work to be done, they must recognise there is a need for the benefits to be acknowledged, both for the individual as well as for the system as a whole.

In terms of the agreements, that is a political task. I would make two suggestions. It was interesting that in all the conversations I had with people, two aspects set the tone. The first was when I suggested that this was about thinking about the choices. Decisions in politics are about choices in terms of where the money goes and where and how reform will occur that will still have a significant effect in 2022 when a child who is 11 years old today is 21, because the political horizon is always relatively short. It is about the opportunity to think into the future, particularly in a crisis. That was a useful space that people went into.

The second was when I spoke about the full spectrum of North-South interaction because very often we just hear the narrative, but the Chairman understands that there is a single electricity market on this island. I like the way he referred to a single energy market. That is my suggestion, but technically it is still a single electricity market which makes a difference because gas is outside it, for example. That is a very important matter if we consider the energy security of the island. Gas is being piped in from the west coast which might mean that the entire island would not be dependent on that one pipeline from Scotland for its gas. For those of us who use gas in their homes, it would make quite a difference not to have it. The sense of energy security we get there is important.

We have the agreements, the cross-Border bodies, InterTradeIreland and Tourism Ireland, which has a dotted line relationship to the agreements. We have NAMA, which is outside the agreements. We have the co-operation that takes place between the security forces, the co-operation on tackling diesel laundering and beyond that the money that goes to sport and cultural organisations that operate on an all-island basis. If we embrace the full spectrum of that, that is a fair degree of activity, but it is very rarely brought together and examined in its totality and as a challenge for the two jurisdictions in terms of doing things and moving them on.

I might pose questions rather than answer the Deputy's questions. Are we going about dealing with that and progressing that full spectrum of activity efficiently and effectively?

Are the agreed arrangements that are in place up to that challenge? Are they up to it in an EU context, in particular? When preparing for today's meeting I rang a couple of economist friends who told me the biggest existential threat to what has been achieved is that of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union. This has been discussed seriously in London. With regard to the practical movement of people and goods on this island, we could return once again to having a border. It is unlikely that there will be halfway houses. In this regard, one should consider the consequences of a return to our position in 1989 and 1990 before the Single Market programme, bearing in mind the status of the United Kingdom and the question of the Scottish referendum.

Despite these considerations, the European Union is moving on with regard to energy and water. A single EU energy market is approaching. It is really important and there is work going on in this regard. There is a success story in the form of the single electricity market because it involves insured investment. It provides regulatory certainty and has led to lower prices for consumers in Northern Ireland and the Republic. This is challenged by the wider market, into which there must be integration. How do we continue to have success? While there is work taking place at technical level, is there enough awareness among the wider population and business community, who are concerned about energy prices, that holding onto that benefit is one of the important challenges faced by the two Administrations? While there is work at administrative level, are there agreed arrangements between the relevant Ministers that are ambitious and forward-looking in that regard?

With regard to new relationships, the most striking phenomenon in the past 20 years has been the relationships between politicians and decision makers generally. I was involved in an initiative in the noughties, the North-South round table group, which had a role in founding and facilitating that development. We were working with very few relationships at the beginning. Now, anybody present can telephone a representative in Northern Ireland, even if he does not know him. There are no barriers in this regard. We forget that this was not possible ten or 15 years ago. We must consider how this arrangement is being leveraged and how personal trust is being used to take account of the new challenges facing each generation. What is the practical evidence? Are public representatives talking to their constituents enough about this matter? What message is being given to them about the benefits of North-South co-operation?

Let us consider the challenge of prosperity and the need for initiatives. If one stands still in sport, one actually goes backwards. I could quote any number of examples from Arsène Wenger this morning. He stood still for a decade and now has gone back. I am a rugby person. There will be 50,000 people in the Aviva Stadium for an upcoming Leinster game but when I played for Leinster, the spectators amounted to no more than ten men and their dog. One cannot stand still and one must move forward. We must examine the extent to which the agreements and interactions are helping in that regard.

Economists love charting trends with tables and indices. One wakes up every morning and hears the markets have moved or that the price of gilts has decreased, resulting in another crisis. Let us imagine a chart of North-South interaction on new arrangements from 1993 to date. Imagine also a steady line for arrangements on the agreement and a broken line for arrangements outside the agreement. For 1993, there would be only a broken line, rising slowly. For 1998, the unbroken line would shoot up because of the agreements and all the arrangements, resulting in the disappearance of the broken line. For the period 1998 to 2002, the line depicting new arrangements and the agreement would gradually decrease. For 2007, the broken line would shoot up suddenly, with the kicking in of the single energy market. NAMA was established shortly thereafter.

Let us imagine the chart in 2022. Imagining that we currently have a value of ten, we must ask whether anyone is setting a target for new arrangements such that we will be at 50 in 2022. What should the target be? The economist in me would like to leave members with this observation.