Northern Ireland Subvention: Possible Unification Effects

This IIEA note on the subvention to support the Northern Ireland Budget updates an earlier version in FitzGerald and Morgenroth, (2019), and additional evidence provided by FitzGerald and Morgenroth to an Oireachtas Committee in 2021. Birnie, 2023, has updated these figures using the latest data to 2021.

This note also uses the latest data, and expands on Birnie’s work by considering the cost of raising welfare rates and public sector pay rates in Northern Ireland to the level of those in Ireland. It also shows how the numbers would be affected if the assumptions, made by Doyle and others, about the UK absorbing the cost of Northern Ireland’s share of the UK debt and the UK continuing to pay social insurance pensions were to be part of an agreement on unification.

It summarises the accounting conventions, detailed in FitzGerald and Morgenroth’s earlier paper, and concentrates on providing updated figures on the subvention, its derivation, and how it might be affected under a united Ireland.