Professor John FitzGerald:

I will answer the question on education and leave the remaining questions to Professor Morgenroth. Education is a matter for Northern Ireland to work out. When I have presented the results in the North, there has been huge resistance because generally the people to whom I speak are parents who have children in grammar schools and they say the grammar schools are great. They are right; they are great. The one area where there is a possible win - a quick win - in education in Northern Ireland is the fact that there are a huge number of graduates of working age born in Northern Ireland in Great Britain. If one could attract back a substantial portion of them, that would transform the economy. Another paper published for the Department for the Economy by Iulia Siedschlag and colleagues in the ESRI looking at foreign direct investment across the EU with a particular focus on Northern Ireland shows that third-level education graduates are key. How does one attract them back? I am old enough to have been around in the 1970s and 1980s. We would have been very pessimistic in the 1980s. Irish people were emigrating and saying that they would never come back. They turned out to be homing pigeons and came back. Research done by Alan Barrett of the ESRI and others shows that they are 10% more productive having learned how to do things differently abroad. If Northern Ireland got a lot of graduates back from Great Britain, they could change the culture and economy. That is what happened with the Republic of Ireland. We have not paid enough attention to the fact that people coming to Ireland with experience from outside - generally Irish people - have transformed this economy and society. That is a potential quick win for Northern Ireland.