Unionists should have pursued two economic concessions during the Belfast Agreement talks
The huge IRA-generated setback to the Northern Ireland economy, described in my last two Saturday columns, might have been somewhat alleviated after 1998 had the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement of that year sought to address the economic as well as political problems of that part of the island.
Unfortunately, since the Northern Ireland crisis erupted 40 years ago, none of the Northern Ireland political parties - with the occasional exception of the SDLP - have shown much serious interest in the economy of Northern Ireland.
I can recall meetings with parties in the North at which I endeavoured to alert members of different parties to the catastrophic decline in that area's share of our island economy - but evoked only blank looks from both sides.
I had hoped that when the time came in the mid-1990s for these parties to sit down together to seek a settlement of their differences, they might at last consider addressing crucial economic issues.
Perhaps it was too much to hope that Sinn Féin/IRA, which had spent a quarter of a century seeking to destroy the Northern Ireland economy, would at that stage start to reflect on the extent to which their activities had succeeded in throwing up a huge new obstacle to progress towards Irish political unity. But, unhappily, in that negotiation unionists of both varieties appeared equally uninterested in serious economic issues.
At the time of that prolonged mid-1990s negotiation I believed that those discussions, which involved two sovereign governments with a huge interest in their success, would provide a unique opportunity for the unionist leadership to win from these governments some potentially important economic concessions.
Such concessions could have helped to turn the tide of Northern Ireland's rapid relative economic decline within the context of the island of Ireland.
Had I been in David Trimble's place at that negotiation I would have made it a precondition of signing any agreement that the British government agreed to reduce corporation tax down to near the 12.5 per cent rate applicable within this State.
Tony Blair was so desperate for an agreement that I believe he could have been persuaded to favour such a concession, and at that time - and at that time only - he had the capacity to twist Gordon Brown's arm on this issue.
Moreover, only in that unique negotiating context, when peace in Northern Ireland was at stake, could the European Commission, and governments like those of Germany and France, have been persuaded to concede an extension of our hated low corporate tax rate to the other part of our island.
Yet this issue does not seem to have been raised by Trimble during that negotiation, and it certainly was not made a precondition of his agreement to a settlement.
The unionists could and should also have pressurised the Irish Government to agree that the full resources of one of the most sophisticated and successful of Irish public institutions, the Industrial Development Authority (IDA), be shared with Northern Ireland. If necessary, this industrial promotion body could have been placed under neutral chairmanship so as to ensure that it would work just as hard for the North as for the South.
As we approach the 10th anniversary of that agreement, it is fair to ask why neither of these two essential tools for Northern Ireland economic recovery were made preconditions by the Unionist Party for a settlement.
The only explanation I have been offered for this double negotiating failure is that it reflected a deep antipathy on the part of Trimble to any moves in the economic area that would either differentiate Northern Ireland from Britain or would link it economically more closely to our State.
This antipathy may have been reinforced by some lack of understanding of, or interest in, economic issues on his part.
If that were the case this should have been countered by Trimble's economic advisers at that period, Graham Gudgin and Esmond Birnie.
However, although at that time the Celtic Tiger process had been under way for some years in our State, those two advisers were in denial about this process, and were disputing this issue with me in the Northern Ireland media - claiming, absurdly, that the Celtic Tiger was a myth.
That denial process may well have prevented those two economic advisers from grasping the urgency for Northern Ireland of securing from the sovereign governments these two key concessions, without which it would clearly be very difficult - in practice impossible - for Northern Ireland to undo much of the damage that had been inflicted on its economy by the prolonged IRA campaign.