Mr. Peter Sheridan:

I will pick up on some of that. Brexit is Brexit. We do not know the terms of the exit yet so we do not know what it means. The Senator is right from that point of view.

Sometimes the phrases "hard border" and "soft border" conjure up things in people's minds. Particularly for those who live in Northern Ireland or along the Border counties, a hard border brings up images of Border checkpoints that were there in the past during the Troubles. I do not for one minute believe it will ever come down to that again. We will not see Border checkpoints. Even in terms of customs, much of it can be done electronically. There might be a need for some spot checks but in some ways that happens now. A few weeks ago I was on a bus and a Garda officer got on and was checking people who were crossing the Border so there are controls there already.

There is some debate about whether this border will be along the 300-odd mile Border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland or down the middle of the Irish Sea. Interestingly, there are people on my board who do not want one or the other because they come from different sides of the debate on it. In terms of the movement of people, I do not envisage there will be demonstrable change in how we move across the island, particularly if the common travel area is protected.

I gave evidence at a House of Lords committee the other day and I said there are officially no border controls between Germany and Switzerland. Switzerland is not in the EU although it did sign the Schengen Agreement in 2004. One can fly from Berlin to Zurich using an identity card; one does not need a passport to travel between the two countries. They have what is called inland flights, like we have domestic flights here. One can walk from Basel across the border without any documentation. There are models that do not necessitate the things that conjure the idea of a hard border in people's minds. We will be arguing for as minimal an effect as possible, particularly in the movement of people, but also in trade. The difficulty is that if one is outside the customs union and one moves goods into the customs union, there will have to be some sort of checks. Even if there are no trade or tariff differences, there will have to be some sort of checks. We tend to look at this from our perspective but what about the rest of Europe and how it would envisage the Border? Britain and Ireland might decide on a particular type of border but it will be a European border as much as a UK one. It depends how the rest of Europe views that Border.