Northern Ireland has featured on the front page of this newspaper thousands of times over the past 30 years and mostly in the context of arguments and developments about the so-called constitutional position, writes Michael Smyth
Over recent months the North has grabbed the headlines because of commercial and economic developments such as Aer Lingus's decision to transfer Heathrow slots from Shannon to Belfast. Dr Alan Gillespie's suggestion that the inward investment efforts of Northern Ireland and the Republic should be fused together into a single agency has already stirred up a debate about the future direction of industrial development on this island.
The idea of merging Invest Northern Ireland and IDA Ireland is not a new one but as articulated by a former chairman of Invest Northern Ireland and the current chairman of a major all-island financial institution it now needs to be taken seriously at executive level in both jurisdictions.
Dr Gillespie's call for the more effective marketing of the island in terms of inward investment was just one element of a carefully scripted analysis of the development challenge facing a now peaceful Northern Ireland. He also called for enhanced measures to stimulate indigenous business, to boost competitiveness, to encourage enterprise and to reform the bloated Northern Ireland public sector. There are some serious practical difficulties in bringing together the two inward investment propositions. Aside from concerns about loss of policy sovereignty which might be felt more acutely in Dublin than in Belfast, there are issues of the two currency zones, two personal and corporate tax regimes and social insurance differences.
These are not trivial differences.
Northern Ireland has been quite successful in attracting lower value-added inward investment in the form of call centres and shared service investments but as things stand it cannot compete with the Republic for the kinds of highly waged, high-value added knowledge-based investment that it needs in order to raise living standards. In recognition of this, rather than merging Invest NI and IDA, an alternative approach might be to facilitate a closer alignment of the industrial development strategies of the two economies to make them more mutually supportive. This alignment would be based upon the relative strengths of both economies. It would enable Northern Ireland small and medium enterprises to play a much more active part in developing supply chains with the large inward investment sector in the Republic. In addition the innovation, research and development and knowledge transfer activities in both economies could be brought closer together into a more critical mass.
Greater co-ordination of industrial development strategies would also imply a more harmonised approach to skills formation across the island and would pave the way towards a more integrated labour market. Closer alignment of development strategies would allow room for Invest NI, IDA Ireland and Enterprise Ireland to continue to deliver on their specific remits, while at the same time enabling them to operate on a slightly larger stage.
Regardless of the future configuration of inward investment institutions, the debate about economic relations between the two parts of this island is now under way. This makes a refreshing change to public discourse about Northern Ireland. The days of yah-boo in the North and of shouts of "tiocfaidh ár lá" and "file transfer protocol" are fading fast.
Michael Smyth is senior lecturer in economics at the University of Ulster