Professor Gavin Barrett:

I echo the sentiments expressed by my colleague, Professor Murphy. It is a pleasure and honour to be invited here. Suggested discussion points were given to me on four topics: UK-Ireland relations, the Good Friday Agreement, trade, and the common security and defence policy. I will make some remarks on all four points.

Ireland is clearly in a very difficult position as a result of Brexit. In the European Union we are in a Single Market of half a billion consumers. No convincing case can be made for leaving it and yet the UK is departing. While it represents only 13% of our exports, it is hugely significant for particular businesses, the food sector, farms, small and medium sized enterprises, Border enterprises and Irish-owned enterprises. There is very much a sense of being pulled in two different directions by the process of Brexit. The risk of the UK distancing itself from Ireland, which I was asked to talk about, depends very much on how hard Brexit turns out to be which as Donald Rumsfeld might put it, is a known unknown. The worst case scenario is of no agreement being reached on future relations between the UK and Europe, in which case economic relations would fall back on WTO rules. That is essentially a reduced tariff arrangement. Economically, it would be a very serious situation for Ireland because it would lead to tariffs on Irish exports and vice versa.

In the agricultural field, WTO tariffs can be quite high and that would go side by side with vastly increased competition in the UK market and also, I suspect, with a plummeting sterling which would not make life easier either. No agreement, contrary to what Ms Teresa May keeps saying, is very much worse than a bad agreement, certainly from an Irish perspective.

A step up from that would be a free trade agreement like the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, under which there would be no tariffs on goods within the free trade area, that is, the UK and the European Union, but tariffs on goods produced outside, for example, in China, Russia, Korea and so forth. That seems quite likely if Ms Teresa May holds to her position of exiting the customs union. It implies that border controls will be introduced between the UK and Ireland in order to control the entry and exit of third-country produced goods. It also enables the UK to drop its tariffs on non-free trade area products so it involves massively increased competition in the UK market for Irish producers. It would be bad news, for example, for Irish beef producers and other agricultural producers.

A customs union is the next stage of integration but that is unlikely because Ms Teresa May said in her Lancaster House speech that she wants to leave the customs union. However, she is not as vociferous on that point as she has been previously. That arrangement would involve no customs controls and therefore, no hard border between the Republic and Northern Ireland. It could see, however, regulatory divergences creep in between the UK and Ireland as the UK would no longer be bound by Single Market rules. In these circumstances, Ireland would need to be very careful not to allow a situation to develop in which it would be undercut by lower UK environmental, labour and consumer standards and state aid rules. However, the EU Commission's draft negotiation guidelines indicate a strong awareness of these dangers.

The Single Market would be the next step up. If we could get a Norway-type relationship, where the UK is outside the European Union but still in the Single Market, that would be the best situation, apart obviously from continued membership. However, even that would involve some distancing from Ireland in that the UK would no longer participate in the institutions of the European Union. Thus, in some but not all policy areas, Ireland would lose an ally. We would also lose UK money - Britain contributes 10% of CAP funding - and the benefit of the resources that the UK puts into processing European Union law, for example, reports, policy inputs, judicial decisions implementing legislation as a precedent and so forth. That much said, in a Brexit scenario, that would be an optimal result for us but I do not think we are going to get it.

I was also asked to consider the likely direction of negotiations on the rights of Irish and other citizens living in the UK. In that context we must distinguish between the rights of those who are or have been resident in the UK at the time of Brexit and those who take up residence afterwards. As regards the first category, the European Council guidelines, which were unanimously agreed by all of the Heads of State or Government on 29 April, described safeguarding the status and rights derived from EU law at the date of withdrawal of EU and UK citizens and their families as the "first priority" for the negotiations. A lot of importance is going to be attached to this. The annexe to the Commission's draft mandate is more specific. Among the rights it seeks to see protected are residence rights, social security rights, workers' rights under EU regulations, the right to take up self-employment and the right, very interestingly, to family reunification and to the recognition of qualifications. This is not just about workers but about anyone who is covered by the Citizenship directive. The rights involved are very extensive and it seems likely that this will have to be agreed to because the price of not agreeing may be no agreement at all.

The situation for the second category, that is, people who move to the UK after Brexit, will depend on whatever is agreed between the UK and the EU. The European Council guidelines indicate that participation in the Single Market requires free movement of persons. The guidelines hold that one cannot split up the four freedoms and that is a position that is likely to be insisted upon by the Eastern European states in particular. However, I think that price may well be too high for the UK so Britain will leave the Single Market. Controlling immigration seems to have been one of the reasons for the Brexit vote and it still seems to be a very high priority for Ms Teresa May, according to press reports of recent days. In principle, anything less than a Single Market does not involve free movement rights for individuals. In other words, a customs union or a free trade area will achieve nothing in terms of free movement rights for EU or Irish citizens. It is possible, and perhaps quite likely, that some free movement rights will be negotiated but judging by the published account of the conversation at the dinner from hell between Mr. Juncker and Ms May, the negotiations can be expected to be quite difficult. There is also a possibility that the UK will unilaterally confer rights on Irish citizens alone after Brexit. It has done that before but for the moment, everything is up in the air.

I was also asked to consider the impact of Brexit on the Good Friday Agreement and in particular, on North-South relations and east-west relations. I have already considered the latter relations. In terms of North-South relations we already have, in the Miller case judgment of the UK's Supreme Court, a judicial ruling on at least one aspect of Brexit, that is, that section 1 of the Northern Ireland Act applies only to constitutional change concerning reunification, not Brexit. In other words, the veto on constitutional change does not involve Brexit but only reunification with Ireland. Interestingly, Article 1 (vi) of the Good Friday Agreement guarantees the right of all of the people of Northern Ireland to "Irish or British, or both" citizenships. That is interesting from an EU perspective because citizenship of an EU member state like Ireland brings with it EU citizenship so for the first time, more than 1 million people who are not actually resident in the EU and not presently citizens of an EU member state will become citizens of the EU.

The long-term impact of Brexit on Northern Ireland is very hard to fathom. Brexit was rejected by the electorates in Northern Ireland and Scotland and it may increase the chances of Scotland voting for independence. If that happens, Northern Ireland will have a kind of rump status and that would increase the logic of an economic case for Irish reunification. However, it is far from certain whether that would actually happen or that a majority would come to favour it. European Council guidelines have stressed the need to support the goals of peace and reconciliation enshrined in the Good Friday Agreement. The draft negotiation guidelines are even more explicit in recognising Irish concerns like the common transport area and the transit of goods, which is obviously of major commercial importance to us. There is a lot of awareness of Ireland's risky position in that regard.

I will move on now to a consideration of trade policy and the implications for Ireland of the UK negotiating its own trade agreements. The search by the UK for trade agreements which are worth more than the lost opportunities of the rejected Single Market seems likely to be unsuccessful. The UK will, it is true, be able to offer one advantage over the European Union in trade agreements, namely speedier ratification. However, the product it will be selling will be a lot less attractive because all the UK can offer is access to a market of 70 million consumers as opposed to what will be the EU's 440 million consumers. One can imagine who other countries will be queueing up to negotiate with and who will get the best deal - clearly, it is going to be the European Union. The search for independent trade agreements by the UK is something of a chimera. One is reminded of Philip Stephen's comment to the effect that the UK is abandoning real power in pursuit of the chimera of sovereignty. The search for such international trade agreements is driving the UK's determination to leave the customs union because the customs union requires a common external tariff and thus prevents independent trade deals by the UK. To take that point a step further, one can say that the UK's desire to leave the customs union is actually going to result in border posts being re-erected between Northern Ireland and the Republic, with all of the negative consequences that this will entail. No matter how negotiations go between the UK and the EU, unless and until the UK abandons its plans to leave the customs union, we are stuck with a hard border, effectively. There is no way out of that. Britain may not abandon such plans because they are central to the image of what Brexit means.

Any external trade agreement will likely result in extra competition for Irish food producers and farmers on the British market. When I say that the majority of cheddar on the British market is produced in Ireland, it will give the committee some idea of the economic implications for the food industry and farmers generally. I addressed the recent IFA conference on Brexit - there are many concerned farmers watching this situation.

I was asked to address the common security and defence policy, CSDP. I will make a few rapid comments on this matter. Without the UK, the CSDP would not exist. The UK is a large military player, at least in a European context. It accounts for 40% of public defence investment in the EU and is one of only five EU member states to spend 2% of its GDP on the military. Paradoxically, though, the direct and immediate impact of Brexit on the CSDP may not be great. This is because the UK has, at least since David Cameron took office, been in a state of what has been described as "semi-Brexit" and the Saint-Malo declaration was never followed through with. This was for a number of reasons, including Conservative Party euroscepticism as well as frustration with the small scale of CSDP operations. For a long time, the UK has focused its efforts on NATO and unilateral action alongside other states, Libya being a case in point. It had started to cut back on its contribution to EU deployments and walk away from CSDP long before the referendum.

Although the UK provided leadership in, for example, combating piracy around the Horn of Africa, its contribution in terms of personnel and resources has been limited in recent years, well behind that of much smaller states. It ranks only fifth among contributors to CSDP military operations behind France, Italy, Germany and Spain and seventh among contributors to civilian missions behind Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, France and Finland. It contributes only 4% of the personnel provided by EU member states. To some extent, Brexit represents a loss of potential as much as an actual contribution.

The implications of Brexit relate more to the politics and governance of the CSDP rather than its operations or armaments co-operation. It used to be said jokingly that NATO was an organisation designed to keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down. Using the same approach, the question of what can keep the EU up and the UK in can now be asked. It will require a revision of the CSDP's governance model, that is, the core of states driving it forward, and it will involve a new partnership between the CSDP and the UK as a third party. The EU needs to devise something to replace the Franco-UK axis that was at the core of the CSDP. A Franco-German engine might be one possibility, given that Germany is evolving from a solely civilian power into one taking greater responsibility for international security.

The absence of UK vetoes might make some aspects work more smoothly, given that there would be less opposition to permanent structured co-operation and the possible setting up of a EU military headquarters, but some means of including the UK as a third party contributor operationally will need to be found, for example, a revised framework participation agreement. Defence market co-operation will suffer if the UK falls out. It has a large defence industry operation, so it may want to opt into co-operation in some form. Various possibilities that might happen in the absence of the UK have been suggested, such as the creation of an autonomous EU military headquarters, but we do not know what will happen. It is all uncertain.

The implications for NATO are unclear. The UK is clearly an Atlanticist country and likes the NATO core to defence but, judging by the recent German defence White Paper, it is Atlanticist as well. I see no great desire to get NATO out and to replace it with a European defence alliance.

Regarding the implications for Irish neutrality, that neutrality presented a difficult issue when Ireland was negotiating entry to the European Communities in the first place. However, the EU has expanded to include six neutral and non-aligned states, including us, so any future arrangement is likely to be a coalition of the willing. The special characteristics of national defence policy such as Ireland's are specifically recognised in the treaty, and let us not forget that our Constitution contains a provision precluding our taking part in a European defence alliance. On top of that is the Seville declaration.

Brexit may allow things to happen that would not have happened were the UK still in the EU, and it may require things to happen if the CSDP is to continue to have any relevance or begin to have more relevance. It will require other states to step up to the plate. Its long-term implications are as yet unclear, but I see no threat to Irish neutrality.