The south of Ireland is no longer backward

David McWilliams said in 2014 at the Xchange Summer School:

"If you look back 150 years, Northern Ireland was the Silicon Valley of the world."

He wrote in a 2006 article, ‘North a ‘junkie economy’ reliant upon state handouts’:

"Sometime in the past century, [Northern Ireland’s] Protestant majority swapped Max Weber for Karl Marx."