Keen to hear what members of r/northernireland think of this, as per the story on RTE. Considering the fact that the Irish Government has already pledged close to €1 billion for infrastructure projects in Northern Ireland, what else might they fund?

The old "they can't afford us" Unionist trope that's rolled out against Unification is looking increasingly thin. How many years post unification would it take to bring NI up to the average productivity level of ROI thus negating the need for subvention?

Hopefully, at the very least this will mean more money for cross border infrastructure and long term developments like expanding Magee.

by askmac

14 comments

  1. If reunification was to happen the EU would be a big player. It’s not like brexit where the UK willingly left and ended up in the wilderness with no one to turn to, Ireland has the backing of the EU and if they allowed issues to rise in the reunification process then eyes would turn to them.

  2. How much of this money before the Added few Billions from Apple was the average person down south seeing?
    Add to the fact the Irish government actually fought against getting that Tax money from Apple in the first place as it proves the Irish government basically turned ireland into some type of tax haven!
    Plus Apple has now stated the Irish government needs to start working on improving infrastructure and housing around the area these multi national tech firms have set up or they may be tempted to move on to another country!! A shot across the Irish government bow perhaps??

    To add the amount of money it seems to cost for infrastructure projects down south like Childrens hospitals and Bike sheds then these billions won’t last long!!!

  3. It is quite volatile as it is based on tax on profit.

  4. NI runs an annual tax [deficit](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Ireland_fiscal_balance) of £10 Billion (€12 Billion). Sure you could knock a billion or 2 off for stuff we don’t have to pay for after unification like the British debt, army etc. but the south would have to pay out the most of €10 Billion a year to keep us going.

    And for how long? A generation I reckon. There’s huge swathes of the population dependent on the public sector for employment. And a lot of them will be unwilling or unable to retrain into the private sector so we’ll have to let them retire before the next generation takes over.

    I don’t want to be negative, I’m all for a united Ireland but NI is a total economic basket case and there’re no easy or quick fixes to get out of this mess.

  8. I think the argument that Ireland can’t afford the North is dead.

  9. I think it makes their problems with healthcare actually inexcusable.

    At least we have the excuse that we’ve been starved of funds by a Tory government. 

    They could literally double their healthcare budget and still have 3 billion to tuck away.

  10. Another reason for getting my Irish passport, the GB one looks like it will remain in the drawer for evermore. The 600 person queue for non eu nationals vs the 10 person eu queue during our summer holiday in spain was the final straw, what a fuckup Brexit has turned out to be …

  12. I think it’s yet another reason partition doesn’t make sense. There’s no benefit to being shackled to England. What do we actually get from it?

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