Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the witnesses and thank them for the report. There are a huge amount of data in the report and in the appendices so I would suggest it would be circulated at midnight as it is going out to the press because it leaves us at a disadvantage in that we are commenting on something we have not seen until the next morning. However, that is just a minor issue.

I want to pick up on the issue of Brexit and the commentary in the report on the reasonable probability that a transitional agreement may not be in place and, as the report mentioned, in the context of a hard Brexit, the reduction in Irish output would be 7% as opposed to a maximum of 2.8% in a soft Brexit. The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council has called even those figures into question again in terms of the model that is being used that underestimates the intensity of Irish labour in terms of exports and how we model that in the value of exports. To my knowledge this is the second time the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council has done this, so is it suggesting that the impact of a soft Brexit or a hard Brexit could be underestimated by the Department's modelling and how convinced of that is it?