Professor John Doyle:

I will take the questions in reverse order. I can answer the last question very quickly. It is almost a consensus in academic research, and it is rare that you get consensus, that the key barrier in Northern Ireland to better completion of school and thereby creating a pipeline of young people going on to further education is to abolish the 11-plus examination that divides children at the age of ten into either the grammar school system or the secondary school system. Every piece of contemporary research over the past decade says this is a disaster socially. Can the members imagine their sons, daughters, nieces and nephews having to sit the leaving certificate at ten years of age? That is what we put kids through. We make them do their leaving certificate at ten years of age. Someone put it that way at the seminar yesterday. We know your life chances are, therefore, while not set in stone because kids can wriggle through, statistically are set in stone. Statistically, a child's chances of coming back from not getting into a grammar school at age 11 are small. Those are overwhelmingly the kids who leave school at 15 or 16 years of age. They do not get A-levels and therefore they do not go on to further education. That is the biggest gap. The graduate numbers are similar North and South. They have a problem with the graduates from Northern Ireland in that a third or more of them are working in England. They are there, but it is about finishing secondary school and further education. On the 11-plus, if you were to do one thing in the morning that would make the difference, it would be to end the 11-plus examination. Politically, it has not proven possible. There was an attempt back in the late Martin McGuinness's time where they abolished the legal examination of the 11-plus, but grammar schools colluded effectively to create two private systems because there was not the political will to ban private versions of the examination, and so they continue in all but name. As well as the social consequences of it, it is a huge economic problem as well.

I agree that it would help if there were a merger of IDA Ireland and Invest Northern Ireland. Invest Northern Ireland has a difficult product to sell. It is not that the staff working for Invest Northern Ireland are poorly qualified or bad at their jobs. If we took the best of our IDA Ireland staff and stuck them in the Invest Northern Ireland offices in Belfast or North America, with nothing else changing, they would struggle to get a different performance. The merger would help, therefore, but, unfortunately, I do not see any political willingness in this regard. It is not just on the part of the unionist parties but also that of the British Government. They have set their face firmly against considering this question at all. Such a merger would be a good idea. If there were to be any political capacity to advance it, that would make a difference. I am just not sure it is possible now.

Nobody disagrees that the education system needs to be significantly improved in Northern Ireland. I refer to companies. There is a slight Intel effect that would be quicker than a 20-year change for sure. It is the capacity to persuade companies to make the investment that is the issue. This is the work we are doing with Mr. Hetherington's colleagues in the EPC. I refer to getting beyond the statistical analysis. We have good data now on things like the educational infrastructure. The question now is why the ESRI model did not predict any improvement, even if we fixed the education system. I am not saying do not fix it, because we absolutely need to. The worrying aspect, however, is that we would expend all the money and still not get the result we want. It is early days and I would not want this to be the final word on the matter.

Increasingly, we are hearing from the people we are interviewing on an off-the-record basis in companies and from investors themselves that even if the graduates were there, if they do not know what the political situation is going to be in 12 months' time, why would they set up in Fermanagh rather than Monaghan. It is known that Monaghan is going to be in the Single Market next year and the year after. There is also going to be a supply of graduates. Equally, it is known that if there is a need to get a Minister on board to do a final deal in San Diego or Boston, that prospect will be available to me. None of those things, unfortunately, is available to the people of Fermanagh. It will not be possible to get a London Minister on board a delegation. A company located in that county will not be in the Single Market for services, which is the biggest growth area in the economy. There is also uncertainty about what the arrangements in this regard are going to be.

The issue is the degree of political stability, although not in the sense of which party is in power. I do not think anybody in San Diego loses any sleep over whether Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael holds the position of Taoiseach. I also suspect they would not lose any sleep if Deputy Conway-Walsh's party leader were to be in the office. There has been much media coverage of this. There is a big difference, however, between whether it is civil servants making a decision, who are afraid to make any decision because they do not have any political authority to do so, even if they have legal authority, versus a Minister in London or the power-sharing Executive. These are very different decision-makers from the perspective of chief executives in North America. They might get very different outcomes.

Even if we were to fix the things we can measure, it is the unmeasurable aspect when it comes to the decision-makers that will, ultimately, bring 1,000 jobs to Derry or not. If it is not possible for these chief executives to see the right people and if they are not sure whether their facility will be in the Single Market or not, then there are plenty of other places in the world to bring those thousand jobs to. Why take a chance on Northern Ireland? This is the context of the early stages of the work we are doing with Ulster University now. This is not the final word and we have plenty more people to talk to, but we are surprised at how consensual this view is. The OECD deal has taken tax out of the equation as a competitive issue to some extent. It is graduate numbers, infrastructure and certainty that everybody is talking about.