Making Policy in Northern Ireland: A critique of Strategy 2010 by J. Bradley & D. Hamilton
From: Administration 1999 Vol 47 No 3 Autumn (Institute of Public Policy, Dublin)
[3] Policy prescription for faster growth
Strategy 2010 sets out five key principles or broad targets that it seeks to achieve. We examine each of these in turn.
3.1 Equality and social cohesion
Equality and social cohesion are desirable aims in their own right and have an importance and urgency that are independent of economic matters. It has also come to be recognized that modern high technology economies simply cannot function at high levels of efficiency if workplace and wider social relations are not characterized by equality, respect and cohesion. What makes the situation in Northern Ireland unique is that some important socio-economic differentials (e.g., unemployment rates) have opened up between members of two different communities rather than simply between two socio-economic groups. Addressing such differentials will call for focused and determined policy responses.
Strategy 2010 picks its way carefully through this minefield. Policy areas related to the achievement of equity and social cohesion include industrial location and social partnership. With respect to location policy, the report stresses the trade-off likely to exist between the benefits of clustering and issues related to access. Those familiar with the history of location policy in the 1950s and 1960s will know that serious mistakes were made in the past when development was concentrated in the greater Belfast region at the expense of the western and southern periphery (Bradley, 1996, pp. 95-109). In addition, the drift of UK social policy during the period 1979-97 was one in which social partnership was not encouraged, leaving Northern Ireland with a legacy of institutional arrangements far less advanced than, say, those operating in the Republic of Ireland or in Northern Europe, even before one contemplates the additional and unique complicating problems of inter-community relations.
On the issue of future locational policy, Strategy 2010 endorses the regional plan outlined in the earlier DOE report, Shaping our Future. However, in its discussion of the trade-offs that exist between inclusivity (or equity) and efficiency, one detects echoes of the locational debate of an earlier era that came down very much in favour of concentration-based efficiency criteria, the social consequences of which proved so divisive.
Concerning social partnership, two specific recommendations are made: first, the establishment of an Economic Development Forum (EDF) made up of the social partners; second, the establishment of a high quality research body. Surprisingly, the Northern Ireland Economic Council (NIEC) - a statutory body rather like the South's National Economic and Social Council (NESC) - does not find favour as an embryonic EDF, a judgement call that is probably not unconnected with the pioneering role played by the NIEC in recent years in producing a series of reports that subject all areas of Northern socio-economic activity (and in particular, DED and its family of agencies) to constructive, if sometimes severe criticism. The second proposal that the NIEC might evolve into the recommended research body suggests that the crucial and constructive partnership and consultative role played by the NIEC, and the high regard in which its activities are held across Northern Ireland and elsewhere, do not appear to be appreciated.
3.2 Knowledge-based economy
Perhaps this is an area where the experience of the Republic of Ireland
is instructive, extending over almost four decades of experimentation, evolution
and change. Great understanding and sensitivity is needed in order to strike
an appropriate balance between the vocational skill needs of the existing
economic base, the likely (but often unpredictable) changes in skill requirements
in the future, and the human and individual side of education. Since little
in the way of research in this area is alluded to, the diagnosis in Strategy
2010 lacks depth and authority. |
