Dr. Martina Lawless:

I will take the first question. Brexit is obviously something that we have been raising as a risk for some time. We rather thought that when we came back in mid-September, there would be some greater degree of certainty about the outcome at the end of October. As it is, there has been considerable work done. The Department of Finance put together its summer economic statement on the basis of different scenarios for Brexit with a deal and a no-deal Brexit. We would consider that there could be a fairly significant hit to the economy. The ESRI numbers suggest a reduction of up to 4% in GDP. Those are pretty reasonable middle scenarios in terms of the impact of Brexit on the economy. Economic models can really only do so much in terms of forecasting. They take the current world, where the UK is part of the European Union, and compare it to the alternative world, where the UK is out of the EU, to work out what happens to trade flows, or what happens to migration and public finances. There is a risk that in moving from the current world to the world after Brexit, the initial disruptions could be sharper and more negative. That is where we are. We are not questioning the baseline projections of how significant a hit Brexit could be to the economy; we are just highlighting that it is a baseline projection and that all these economic projections come with some degree of risk. In the context of Brexit, the risks are mainly in the sense that things could be worse than expected, at least temporarily. We do not really know what the timing of the impact could be. There could be a few weeks of particular disruption. Economic models cannot take into account traffic queues at Dover, to give a very obvious example of where things could at least initially be somewhat worse than the longer-term scenarios that are being put forward. There is still a great degree of uncertainty about it. I am not even saying it is necessarily the most likely outcome come end of October but it is certainly prudent to take such a significant risk as the expected approach. The Minister's statement today that the budget would be done on the basis of a hard Brexit aligns very much with our own thinking. As we said, while there is a distinction between the packages that are put in place to try to mitigate that, there is also room for automatic stabilisers to operate if some of the impacts have bigger hits to employment or to tax than can be foreseen at this point.