COMMENT: Pull together or pull apart

Designing national development strategy is difficult. But designing a parallel and compatible regional development strategy is even harder.

We have a clever and robust national strategy (basically, low corporation tax, high education standards, the very effective IDA for attracting and managing inward investment). However, perspectives on the development of our peripheral regions are all over the place: simplistic, poorly organised, depressingly ineffective, and no indication that we are learning from our failures. Even worse, our national strategy is rigidly a 26-county one.

I reflected on these issues as I read through the recently published All-Island Strategic Rail Review. If ever there was an opportunity to knit North and South together in an entirely non-political way using an improved rail system, this was it. But with the exception of Belfast-Dublin and Derry-Letterkenny links, we were effectively offered two back-to-back strategies, the main of objectives of which are to transport people more efficiently internally within the North or within the Republic. (That is, the Republic except for Donegal, which remains isolated from the island rail network of 2050: a kind of transport Outer Mongolia. Perhaps we really have a 25-county national strategy?)

We have never really taken regional policy very seriously on this island, in the sense of having a hard look at how peripheral regional economies differ from those of big eastern and southern population agglomerations. Puzzling, in view of the extremely strong identification Irish people have with their own native counties and towns (just think of the GAA). It seems that when civil servants move from ‘the sticks’ to Belfast or Dublin, they see regions through metropolitan eyes, not meriting much consideration.

Light touch

In the 1960s there was a vigorous debate on ‘growth poles’. This involved selecting a few big urban locations that could benefit from economic, business and social agglomeration economies, with the expectation that they would interact effortlessly with surrounding areas, spreading prosperity from the core to the periphery.

This proved politically unattractive in an era when population was not as skewed to urban east and south as it is today, with obvious implications for Dáil representation. A light-touch policy that encouraged regional dispersal of the benefits of (mainly) inward investment was preferred. Native businesses could take care of themselves.

Sixty years later we have an island economy that has a tiny number of developed urban regions. Less-favoured peripheral regions have had some injections of foreign investment, but they lack the appropriate infrastructure for growth to become self-sustaining.

In the absence of proper strategic planning, the desire to disperse economic development opportunities to the regions was frustrated by centripetal market forces. We ended up with a regional outcome that nobody ever wanted: a few prosperous but overcrowded cities and many seriously lagging peripheral regions.

The situation in Northern Ireland is even worse, with a general dearth of strategic interest in its own sub-regions and an unwillingness to embrace strong, mutually beneficial cross-border development initiatives. Official Northern Ireland statistics make it impossible to explore how, say, the economies of the Newry-Mourne region or the region centred on Derry City are performing relative to other Northern Ireland regions, or relative to Northern Ireland as a whole.

Whereas Ireland was outward looking, enjoyed dramatic growth and caught up to European living standards, Northern Ireland was inward looking, declined and stagnated.

This judgement may appear harsh. There are, of course, isolated centres of excellence, dedication and enthusiasm in the peripheral regions and within the cross-border region.

But there is no overall guiding strategy through which these success stories could cumulate and generate positive spillovers to other parts of the region. Market forces are not absent from regions, but without an appropriate supportive strategy, they are weaker.

What hope?

If it proved impossible to come up with a sensible, integrated all-island rail network by 2050, what hope is there for an integrated regional development strategy for the island that might alleviate or remove the policy fault lines that make it difficult to think coherently on an all-island basis? In its absence, the fact that losses for the North are higher than for the South gives me cold comfort.

We need to address the peripheral nature of the economy of the cross-border region, which was particularly disadvantaged by partition. Far from being a minor issue, this is at the very core of the goal to renew the island economy in mutually beneficial ways.

It is distressing that when one tries to make a case for a cross-border development strategy, one is greeted by old, tired jokes about smuggling. The reality is that both sides of the border region have suffered, while the rest of the island – centred on Belfast and Dublin – goes its separate way.

Why do we fear that honest and realistic discussion of our mutual economic challenges will pose risks to the continuation of peace when the exact opposite it probably nearer the truth?