Dr. Conor Patterson:

I thank the committee for inviting me to speak. With respect to the subject of today's discussion, there are significant barriers that affect pan-island trade and generate profit-diminishing transaction costs. They also encourage an illegal trade which seeks to exploit the fiscal differentials, with resultant reputational damage and loss of revenues, especially in the Border region.

Given the extent of the aforementioned trade distorting barriers, my view is that there needs to be an intergovernmental action plan to achieve a real uplift in pan-island trade and shared development outcomes. As part of that strategy, the transport network surely has to feature as a major priority, with the ultimate aim of ensuring that links between Northern Ireland and the Republic are of such a standard that trade-related travel would no longer be punitively expensive or slow and the scheduling of services would help business collaboration.

The future economic development of most of the island - the areas that are not in the hinterland of Dublin and Belfast - depends on the extent and success of indigenous business growth. A key predictor of indigenous business success is the extent to which those businesses engage in collaboration and networking. Where there are cultural constraints on the propensity to network, or jurisdictional limits on the territory across which it can happen, less business collaboration will take place, with the implication that indigenous businesses will be less successful than they would otherwise be in a more open trading environment. Businesses will only thrive if the ecosystem within which they operate is supportive.

I am an economic development practitioner who has worked in Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Border counties in this State and various EU jurisdictions. Therefore, my perspective is that the model which is most likely to yield the greatest returns is one based on the principle of subsidiarity, which is to bring the conception and delivery of policy as close as possible to the end beneficiaries. In my experience, the greater the distance between their design and management and their intended impact, the less successful publicly funded interventions are likely to be. In the context of promoting more trade and economic co-operation across the island, this means more involvement of stakeholders at county and district council levels in the making and implementation of policy. Such a framework would allow finely calibrated locally sensitive solutions to be quickly put in place. However, this proposition is not at the expense of but complements a macro-political and macroeconomic strategic framework.

Given that an intergovernmental structure to promote all-island trade already exists, through InterTradeIreland, and that governance arrangements are already in place, a signal of intent would involve two things: first, to empower that institution with serious budget and substantive powers; and second, to mandate Enterprise Ireland, IDA Ireland and Invest Northern Ireland to collaborate with it much more actively, with the extent of that collaboration regularly reviewed.

At the sub-regional level, I and other colleagues in my area of Newry, Mourne and Down, along with our partners in County Louth, have been working in an innovation alliance to look at ways in which we can utilise our limited resources better and collaborate more effectively to promote greater economic collaboration, trade and growth in the region. We recognise that as partners we are all assets and that by pooling our efforts we can encourage more cross-Border business collaboration. This cross-Border innovation alliance is part of a much more ambitious collaborative effort led by the local authorities in the region which have signed up to a memorandum of understanding. The commitment of central government policy and budgeting is needed to support this effort. The focus of the new regional action plan for jobs on the importance of cross-Border collaboration can offer a real prospect to achieve this. A similar shift is required in Northern Ireland.