It would streamline Ireland's economy

The argument

The argument is about duplication rather than about sovereignty. Many public services such as post offices, healthcare and national power and communications systems would be far more efficient if they were a single system across the island of Ireland. Each of those services currently exists twice on one landmass: two administrations, two sets of overheads, two procurement processes and two networks meeting at a border the service itself has no operational reason to recognise. Power and communications are network goods in particular, where efficiency comes from scale and from routing across the whole area served rather than up to a boundary and back. The obstacle is constitutional rather than technical. While Northern Ireland remains in the UK, a single integrated system is not possible, because the two jurisdictions answer to different governments, different budgets and different regulators. Whatever cooperation is arranged between them stops short of integration, since neither administration is able to hand its responsibilities to the other. What unification would deliver follows from removing that obstacle. A United Ireland could provide better services to everyone for a lower cost to the taxpayer, because one system spreads its fixed costs across the whole population of the island rather than across two smaller ones, and what is saved by not maintaining parallel structures is available either as lower taxes or as better provision. The gain would not be confined to the public sector. Private companies would also be able to benefit from streamlined administration procedures — one set of rules, standards and filings instead of two — and would ideally pass the savings on to customers. Taken together, the argument presents unification less as a political end in itself than as the precondition for running the island's economy as one economy rather than as two.

Context

Currently, the island of Ireland features separate services for North and South, even though this is often extremely wasteful.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Currently, Northern Ireland’s economy relies heavily on the public sector, which employs more than 25% of Irish workers. “Streamlining” public services in the event of a United Ireland would mean laying off a huge amount of these workers, or, at best, forcing them to relocate to Dublin to replace workers who have been laid off there. In addition, the quality of many public services could deteriorate if they are provided on an all-Ireland basis. The police, for example, has been a difficult topic in Northern Ireland and it took a great deal of work to create a functioning police force with cross-community support in the PSNI. Replacing this with the Gardai would not be an option. Furthermore, the transition process would be extremely expensive and would swallow, and perhaps surpass, any of the savings afforded by more efficient cross-border services. Not only would road signs, legal documents and many other things need to be changed, but police costs could skyrocket due to the heightened potential for violence and increased instability. Many of Northern Ireland’s largest private companies, such as Bombardier, also do most of their business with the UK, meaning that a United Ireland would introduce an unnecessary obstacle rather than streamlining the economy.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] The job losses from removing this duplication may make the Northern Irish economy weaker