Mr. Paul Hannigan:

I thank the Senator. I appreciate that question and it is an important one in the context of Brexit. Nobody is in favour of Brexit but the one advantage from our perspective, as I have been saying for a while, is that it brought the political focus back on the cross-Border area. That had disappeared from the political agenda for a time. The fact that Brexit arrived meant that, all of a sudden, there was a strong focus on cross-Border issues and what we were trying to do on a cross-Border basis.

In setting up this cluster, we were conscious of mitigating Brexit, particularly with regard to student mobility. There are no physical obstacles to students moving between North and South and we have, maybe, 120 students from Northern Ireland studying in Letterkenny. However, one would think we should have far more. Similarly, there are big numbers from Donegal studying in Magee and Dundalk has similar movement of students. It is more a traditional thing than anything else. The movement has not been to the Republic of Ireland as much as it possibly should have been and it has mostly taken well-worn paths to Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin in the first instance. It is only starting to trickle through and develop further into the institutes of technology in the past while. There are no physical barriers but there are barriers around the development of the clusters, in terms of breaking down people's perceptions, working together and developing relationships.