Dr. Kieran McQuinn:

Certainly in an aggregate sense we have not quantified that type of impact in terms of trying to quantify how much Brexit specifically has impacted investment decisions by firms. We did a piece in our commentary in the summary where we examined the impact of policy uncertainty generally. There are now indicators of what they call policy uncertainty if governments announce different types of policies or there is a large degree of uncertainty about what they may do. My colleague, Dr. Conor O'Toole, looked at this in the context of the different aggregate investment categories such as machinery and equipment, buildings, constructions and so on. We found that there was a very negative impact between policy uncertainty in the US, for instance, and investment decisions here, which is not unsurprising given that a large amount of investment at an aggregate level is driven by multinationals, which are very conscious of what is going on in the US economy. We have done that kind of work but, at an aggregate level, we have not really tried to quantify the impacts of Brexit on investment in particular. We looked at it in the context of consumer sentiment, where we tried to model the impact of Brexit. We saw the way in which consumer sentiment was falling off a cliff since last November and suggested that Brexit had to be the main reason for it as many of the underlying conditions that typically drive consumer sentiment, such as employment, unemployment rates and inflation, are all still very favourable.