BEHIND the dramatic cross-border retail price differential lurks a question: are Northerners just tighter with money, and therefore less of a soft touch than their Southern counterparts, traditionally so much more generous in contributing to supermarket profit margins? No shortage of anecdotal evidence suggests the answer is yes - though an exception might best illustrate the rule, writes Frank McNally.
I was listening yet again this week to Van Morrison's Astral Weeks- 40 years old but still timeless - when, what with all the talk about shopping in Belfast, that verse in Madame Georgesuddenly took on a new light: "And you know you gotta go/ On that train from Dublin up to Sandy Row/ Throwing pennies at the bridges down below/ In the rain, hail, sleet and snow." I'm told the reference to penny-throwing derives from an old — presumably unionist — tradition of pitching coins into the River Boyne whenever you cross it, perhaps in repayment of the debt owed to the site of a battle that saved the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland.
(A more puzzling question about the verse is, if the passenger is throwing pennies at the "bridges down below", what exactly is the train travelling on? Is it hovering somewhere above the rails, like those new high-speed Japanese models? If so, Van is an even greater visionary that we suspected.)
But my main point about Madame Georgeis this: it is one of the very few references anywhere in song or story to a Northerner throwing away money needlessly. In fact, I can't think of another one, offhand.
On our neighbouring island, it is the Scots who enjoy a reputation for being thrifty. And no doubt some of that crossed the sea with the Scots-Irish, who pride themselves even more than the North's other main community on not paying over the odds for anything. Interestingly, however, it is in a county just outside Ulster-Scots heartland that Ireland's greatest concentration of financial prudence is said to reside.
It's a mystery why Cavan people should have been saddled uniquely with such a reputation. Maybe it's just the residual popularity of Niall Toibin's old stand-up routines, in which they featured prominently. Or perhaps it dates from a time when the county had a stranglehold on Dublin pub ownership, thereby risking immortalisation in the Irish oral tradition every time some hard chaw was refused credit or a free drink.
I suspect it was just an accident of geography, copperfastened by the Border. As the southern outpost of Ulster, Cavan forms the front line between the hard-nosed attitudes of the North and those of the spendthrift Republic. It's unlikely that Monaghan people, as a sub-species, are any looser with money. But it's a variation on the old story. If your neighbour gets a reputation for sleeping all day, you needn't get up early either.
IN HIS latest monthly bulletin from the Centre for Cross-Border Studies, my former colleague Andy Pollak raises again the prospect of an all-island economy as a way out of the current difficulties. In doing so, he quotes from an address by economist John Bradley to the recent British-Irish Association conference in Oxford, which made the same argument.
The lines of traffic heading for Newry appear to have approved the concept already. But Bradley suggests that, for the South, creating a real island-wide economic unit would be as challenging as two previous epoch-making decisions, also taken in difficult times. The first was in 1958 when the Republic emerged from behind the tariff barriers to become an open economy. The second was the launch of social partnership in the 1980s.
The change would no less dramatic for the North, which would have to shake off its addiction to subvention from the central exchequer (before London withdraws it anyway), and start aligning its fond ideas about hard work and self-reliance with reality. But the reward, Bradley predicts, could be a "resurgence" of the island as a whole, as each part benefited from the other's strengths.
"It would be built on internal self-confidence and high trust. . . It would break with a zero-sum attitude, where Belfast's gain has to be Dublin's loss. It would demand a hard-nosed but strategic approach, where the North must face honestly into making a break with dependency, and the South must recognise that its shiny Celtic Tiger development model is perilously insecure."
I don't doubt Dr Bradley when he says that developing such a symbiotic relationship would be a big challenge. And maybe he is overly optimistic about the potential benefits. But I agree it's worth trying. As a first, confidence-building measure, I suggest we immediately sack the board of the National Consumer Agency, replace them all with Northerners, and relocate the head office to Belturbet.