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Some investments you will win, others you will lose - and Arlene Foster knows it

In the 1960s and 70s the British governments poured in huge sums of cash into investments in the north like De Lorean violence.
In the 1960s and 70s the British governments poured in huge sums of cash into investments in the north like De Lorean violence. In the 1960s and 70s the British governments poured in huge sums of cash into investments in the north like De Lorean violence.

SINCE partition, the history of economic development in Ireland, north and south, has always been a case of 'them and us', with the job-creation agencies in both jurisdictions - while never exactly being at loggerheads with each other - certainly always being in direct competition.

The First Minister's assertion that those pesky people down the road in Dublin are endeavouring to poach potential foreign direct investment from under Stormont's nose is probably right. But what does she expect?

For decades the north had the ball at its toe and mopped up virtually all the big inward investments. In the 1960s and 1970s successive British governments poured in endless tranches of cash into the economy (remember De Lorean?) in an attempt to abate the violence.

Only when the Republic played its corporation tax trump card did the tide eventually turn, and then the giant overseas corporations saw the merits of investing there and not in the north.

That signalled not so much an all-out war between the IDA in the south and IDB (latterly Invest NI) in the north, but certainly a more acute level of "healthy competition".

And there've been winners and losers down the years. There are several examples of a particular inward investor choosing one jurisdiction over the other - either citing the Republic's favourable tax regime, or the north's flexible grant packages and access to a pool of ready labour.

Indeed in 2007, at the height of the economic boom, a former chairman of the old IDB even mooted the merger of investment and development agencies across Ireland

Alan Gillespie suggested, perhaps mischievously, that: "Why can't we promote an all-island economy through a single joined-up effective agency with the IDA and INI no longer competitors, but merged and fully collaborative?"

Wouldn't that compromise sovereignty? Not unsurprisingly, the plan went nowhere.

Economists argue that present-day industrial policy in Ireland could be crudely characterised as a process whereby the regional agencies, using a wide range of incentives, bid for subcontracting roles from global multinational firms and then attempt to influence the allocation of these activities over their respective regions in order to satisfy conflicting mixtures of economic, social and political criteria . . .

So as Arlene should know from her time in the economic ministry, some you'll win and some you'll lose.