Mr. Brendan O'Connor:

We had the IMF with us for two weeks until last Friday. I was in many meetings with it, including on this issue. We have representatives from the Commission with us this week as part of its post-programme surveillance, PPS, mission. Article 4 is part of post-programme monitoring as well. We have a meeting about Brexit in the Department of Finance tomorrow. There is one in the Central Bank tomorrow. I think most of what the IMF said was probably present in our own research. We took a view that we wanted to do much research. This dates back to late 2015, when the first volume came out, and then quite a bit last year. There were several publications. One was earlier this year. We have been very up-front in bringing our research to as many people as possible, including domestically, to the Low Pay Commission, for example, and others that have wanted to hear what we have to say. The institutions have had many questions.

We would agree with some of the IMF's comments, which would reflect things we have said publicly, not just privately. It is probably focusing on some of the harder Brexit scenario that we have put out. Our own macroeconomic forecasts from 2019 onwards embed those hard Brexit scenarios anyway. Therefore our labour market forecasts would already incorporate those scenarios. If one looks at our labour market forecasts, we will have a situation by the end of this decade where we expect more people in work in Ireland than ever before. Going back to what Mr. Callinan said, from a counterfactual perspective - that is to say relative to a situation where there is no Brexit whatsoever - this path is a little more muted in some scenarios.

The final point is to summarise, as Mr. Callinan said, that all of our modelling and analysis is very much on a no policy change scenario. We already saw policies introduced and announced in the budget last year. It was very clear at that time that that was the first in a number of budgets that would take Brexit into account. There was a single publication called "Getting Ireland Brexit Ready". It was very specific. Some policies were announced there. Some policies are sectoral. Some that were announced are fiscal as well. One would anticipate more as time projects.