ABSTRACT
In recent years, the debate on economic policy in Northern Ireland has become increasingly politicised. Some professional economists have resisted this trend, clinging to the technocratic, apolitical spirit of the discipline. The revisionists argue that c is essentially reactionary, racist, irrelevant and founded on 'pieties' and 'myths'; in Wilson's more robust lexicon Republicanism becomes 'fascist', and Irish culture a joke. Northern Ireland is essentially a peripheral regional economy, steadily deindustrialising and increasingly dependent on state expenditure. The artificial respite provided by World War II could not mask the slow long-term decline of the North's traditional industrial base. The North's position within the European Union (EU) is described as 'draughty' and the prospects for a new world of employment generating high-tech industries is considered 'not quite as rosy as they are pretended to be'. Unionist economists have pointed to the difficulties involved in achieving North-South economic harmonisation.
