Dr. Kieran McQuinn:

We make a distinction, as we outlined earlier. I hold my hands up because I mainly work on short-term forecasting, but the longer-term work, in which Dr. Lawless has been involved, is comprehensive, robust and rigorous, and it will not get any better at predicting the impact on the economy. The issue is when that is mapped through to the short run, that is, how a no-deal Brexit at the start of 2020 will impact the economy that year. That is when we start getting into the realm of guesstimates, because it is a matter of mapping the longer-term trade implications onto the short term but nobody has a good quantification of the unknown unknowns. We do not know what will happen if there is a complete meltdown of financial markets or severe tailgates at Dover and Calais, and subsequently at Irish ports disruptions of supply chains and so on. It is difficult to assess the impact of that in the short run. When it comes to estimating the short-term impacts, the forecasts come with sizeable confidence intervals.