Dr. Tom Healy:

To address the question about the common travel area, the honest answer is that I do not know because we have three interfaces here, with Northern Ireland, between this island and the next island, Great Britain, and with the Continent. When we factor in all the proposed backstops and the fact that one of the major reasons was concern about migration, this does not add up. Something has got to give somewhere. If we have a common travel area with the next island, we will not have a common travel area with the Continent.

If there is a common travel area around the frontier of the European Union, there will have to be controls at the border between the North and the South. Something has to give somewhere and it will impact on workers coming into the South every day to work on building sites and developments who can be seen on the M1 motorway and in other places. There is another land bridge about which we have not talked. It is the road from Aughnacloy to Strabane, known as the A5. Our fellow citizens in northern Donegal are connected by a slender slice of EU territory south of Bundoran. It is a serious point for people living and working there. Many people living in County Donegal work in Derry and vice versa. It is similar in many other areas along the Border. There are major unanswered questions, to which not even the British Cabinet, as it meets tomorrow, has definitive answers. It will take many years for all of this to unravel. Politically, the only way to move forward is to develop a sufficiently broad fudge in order that enough people will be on board to get it over the line in 27 parliaments, plus the British Parliament.

There is then the question of the Belfast Agreement. There is no mention of economics in the Good Friday Agreement because it was just assumed that the European Union would make everything possible in terms of markets, convergence and movement towards an all-island economy, but Brexit has changed everything. The Good Friday Agreement is not the same, or at least it is not premised in the same way as it was in 1998.

Someone asked what we should prioritise. We should prioritise education, skills, retraining and investment in public transport. I mentioned ports, but we also need to get our fossil fuel import dependency rate down quickly, from the current 85% to something much lower, because we are very vulnerable. We cannot put all of our eggs in one basket. An interconnector to France would help, but that is not going to happen any time soon. We have to look at native sources of renewable energy to replace some of the external dependency.

There are lots of challenges and unknowns. I wish I could provide more certainty on some of these estimates, but we are dealing with a very fast moving situation. In addition to all of this, of course, Brexit is only one thing that is changing. We have climate change, geopolitics and a possible breakdown of the multilateral trade system; all of which will probably matter more than Brexit in the long term. We are talking about one of many challenges.