Dr. Martina Lawless:

I will start on the Brexit issue. All of the work we have done on Brexit has been looking at trade data and the focus has been very much on the food and agricultural sectors, which are the most exposed. It is not difficult to look across the country at where these economic activities are to see that it spreads the exposure more towards rural than urban areas.

People have spoken occasionally about the potential positives of Brexit, for example, the possibility that some foreign direct investment will be diverted towards Ireland. This, too, is very much focused on an uneven geographic spread. If there is a reallocation of some financial sector activity from the United Kingdom to Ireland, it is likely to move towards Dublin or other urban centres, which would further exacerbate the potential for regional disparities resulting from Brexit.

On addressing or mitigating this risk, Deputy Boyd Barrett hinted that the impact of Brexit remains very much unknown. We have been trying to pin down the impact of Brexit in particular scenarios, for example, in the event of World Trade Organization tariffs being applied. However, as it is an ongoing political process, we do not know how it will pan out. A transition arrangement involving very little change could be in place for several years or there could be a failure to come to an agreement that results in a short, sharp shock to the Irish export market in 2019. It is difficult to put a range of probabilities on those outcomes.

Mitigating the risk will involve encouraging the identification of other opportunities, exploring alternative markets and seeking opportunities for diversification. This is what the individual firm can do. A budgetary process can support this by ensuring the financial infrastructure and working capital supports are in place. The aid provided by enterprise services in identifying these other markets and understanding what it takes to launch a product in a particular market, as well as the advice they give on that front, will probably be very important. Naturally, this aid will be taken up more by firms that are more exposed.

I am not sure if a particular regional Brexit strategy will be necessary. It will probably be rolled into the sectors that are exposed in certain regions. There is a move towards wider spatial strategy concerns in terms of how economic activity should be incentivised to disperse more evenly across regions. However, it is probably something that is a separate regional strategy or spatial process, rather than something that is directly in response to Brexit.