Ms Cora O'Brien:

In terms of Deputy Sherlock’s point on the R&D regime, the other concern about the loss of control and sovereignty is that if we signed up to this and said, for example, in the whole scheme of things our research and development regime would not be as good but we would accept that because of other compensating reasons and then two or three years down the road we found a really serious impact on the economy it would be very hard to change it again because one would have to get all the member states to agree to re-open the issue. The veto is there and people can exercise a veto for different reasons. It might not be because they do not like the R&D regime.