Ms Kerry Curran:

We are very grateful for the additional resources we have received to date from the Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation. We have a plan in place for our Brexit research activities and the Brexit advisory service for 2018. We are comfortable that we have the funding to do what we have said we will do with regard to Brexit. If we had more funding we could do more but we know what we are hoping to achieve in the course of the next 12 months and we have the resources in place for that.

If there was no Brexit we would be in a different world. There is much more we would and could be doing if there was no Brexit. We have plans in our current research programme apart from the issue of Brexit. We want to better understand cross-Border trade in services which over the past number of years has become as important as cross-Border trade in goods. There is very little research on that cross-Border structure for services and we would like to understand it better. We are doing additional research and would like to do more on cross-Border public procurement and also in investment decisions by firms, which have altered in light of Brexit. Even if Brexit had not occurred it is an area that we would like to better understand as an organisation. They are a couple of areas in which we would be doing research if there was no Brexit. There is plenty to do to help businesses across the island of Ireland to fulfil the potential of cross-Border trade and the all-island economy.