Dr. Martina Lawless:

I thank Deputy O'Donnell for the question. The assumption that went into the budget, and which we thought was appropriate given the risks involved, was that there would be a hard Brexit, one without a free trade agreement. The work we have done at the council, and informed by the work with the Department of Finance and the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, is that even a free trade agreement would probably reduce long-term Irish GDP by approximately 3%. A disorderly Brexit would increase that and bring it to almost double and there would be many differences across sectors in particular that we would be concerned about. The agri-food industry and the domestic SME sector would be particularly exposed, both because they trade more with the UK than the larger multinationals, which make up a lot of our total exports, and because they often export products such as agricultural products or food products, which would attract the highest tariffs under either the EU's tariff regime for imports or the UK's universal tariff, which it would apply to Irish exports going there.