Madam, - Ulster Bank chairman Alan Gillespie's case for merging the IDA with its Northern equivalent, Invest NI, is a compelling one (Opinion & Analysis, October 3rd). In the course of my work researching and developing practical North-South co-operation, I rarely come across a Northern business leader, whatever his or her political views, who does not believe that closer co-operation with the Republic of Ireland generally - and on foreign direct investment in particular - would benefit the Northern Ireland economy.
Representative organisations such as the Ibec-CBI Joint Business Council and business-led "think tanks" such as the North/South Roundtable Group do a good job in articulating the need for a collaborative approach to the next phase of economic development on this island: the difficult phase that would see us compete on the world stage as a genuine "knowledge economy".
There are plenty of barriers to be overcome in the North if such a dream is to be realised. Among them are the economy's unhealthy dependence on the public sector, the "brain drain" of its brightest young people to British universities, and a less-than-dynamic private sector and civil service which have a lot to learn from their Southern counterparts.
But there are barriers in the South too. If the island is going to be treated increasingly as a single economic unit by the administrations in Belfast and Dublin (without any sacrifice of political sovereignty), there will be more Southern companies like Aer Lingus and Bank of Ireland who, for reasons of profitability, will choose to take significant parts of their operations north of the border.
At the conference last month in Cambridge where Dr Gillespie first publicly voiced his preference for an all-island inward investment agency, a senior Fianna Fáil politician said there was no possibility of the Government supporting the establishment of such a body unless the British Government agreed to grant a 12.5 per cent corporation tax rate to Northern Ireland. In that unlikely event, what would Southern Irish people think of "our" IDA going out into a fiercely competitive world to tout for business for Belfast and Ballymena and Derry? - Yours, etc,
ANDY POLLAK, Centre for Cross-Border Studies, 39 Abbey Street, Armagh.