Dr. Conor Patterson:

I think the challenge with public sector efficiencies is that we have six rural counties and a relatively mid-sized or smallish industrial city with serious socio-economic problems. The public sector is already quite efficient, by the standards of other regions in these islands. The only way to achieve greater efficiency is by achieving economies of scale and we cannot do that. We need to have two health departments, two education departments and so on. The same structures are having to be made twice in one small population area.

I worry a little about fiscal devolution. I have some experience of Aberdeen, a city that is broadly comparable with Belfast. Could we tell people living in Aberdeen and six counties around it to sail off into the North Sea, be independent and pay for it? I think the Tories would love the North of Ireland to go wholesale for fiscal devolution because they would no longer have to cross-subsidise from the south east of England. I would like to know whatever happened to Northern Ireland being a failed economic entity in that analysis. In a region with a legacy of socio-economic problems that are products of partition, notwithstanding the great improvements that have been made since the Good Friday Agreement, how can there be fiscal devolution in the absence of an all-island framework? My response to the proposition is that fiscal devolution can only take place within an all-island framework.