Mr. Paul Hogan:

I suppose it is the least desirable scenario. That is what I meant by not separating supply from demand. In a contracting economy, one would not necessarily expect net migration to increase to the extent that is perhaps assumed. The reality is the attractiveness of somewhere like Dublin, for example, and maybe the other cities, if we are successful, which we intend to be, could be counteracted by a greater impact in, say, the north midlands or the Border region. One scenario we are likely to see is that, rather than having an overall issue for the State, there will be greater regional disparity, which is what we are trying to counteract or work against. In other words, the cities remain resilient and attractive but more peripheral parts of the country, particularly the Border regions, become more challenged. There is a lot of evidence from the downturn of 2008 onwards that many lower skilled workers migrated elsewhere, not necessarily to the UK but to places like Canada, the Middle East and Australia. We have 100,000 fewer construction workers now in the country than we had in 2007 and those people still have not come back and are obviously happy living elsewhere. I do not think we can make assumptions that it will be even across the State.

One of the things that will be important to us post-2020 is the new EU cohesion framework, which is obviously something we have an interest in, as a State, particularly post-Brexit. One of the key themes of European cohesion is the focus on border regions because, even if there is not something like Brexit between other states, the performance of border regions or peripheral regions tends to be lower than the rest of the state, and that is true in places like France and Germany as much as it is in our own situation. When one considers the fact we are dealing with what will essentially be a third country as well as our own Border region, we have a strong case for increased cohesion funding under the ERDF.

Another aspect of this post-2020 is that the EU wants to focus on metropolitan regions, which ties in very well with its spatial strategy, and it also wants to focus on tying what it calls territorial strategies - in other words, regional planning as we would know it - to funding. We have already had the right sort of thinking around that. In regional development terms, we are trying to look to other sources to counteract the likely uneven impact of something like Brexit in the future, which everything we are doing is trying to work against.