Dr. Martina Lawless:

I thank the Senator for those questions, which covered some very good issues.

There was a question on how much is still to be negotiated and there is a lot to be covered at various levels across government. For most of the matters, particularly related to services, trade and recognition of standards and regulations, they fall under EU competency. Anything to do with external trade is really managed through the EU institutions so there would be fairly limited scope for the Irish Government to do anything bilaterally there, although it would play into how the negotiations and priorities evolve at the EU level.

Apart from overall trade negotiations, there are a number of matters within the competencies of individual governments to negotiate. These relate to recognition of qualifications and the ability of people to move. Much of this in Ireland falls under the common travel area, and we will have a slightly different relationship with the UK in terms of migration than the rest of the EU. That may be Dr. Barrett's area of expertise more than mine. For many of the really significant areas where the costs and restrictions arise, particularly for services, trade and food regulations, they come under EU areas of expertise and priorities in negotiation.

On the question of the Revenue Commissioners and port authorities, they have done an amazing job. The Revenue Commissioners commented in the past week or so that the number of customs declarations processed in January this year was equivalent to what it would normally do in a full calendar year, and it did it with very little obvious impact on supermarket shelves or speed of delivery. That is an amazing testament to the amount of preparation Revenue has put in place. It is often hard for people to give recognition when problems do not happen but they were very thoroughly anticipated and dealt with in advance.

With the figure of €892, there are a number of caveats. First, it assumes that people go into supermarkets and pick out the same UK product, which is now more expensive, instead of switching to an Irish alternative or an alternative from elsewhere in Europe. It was the best way to get a sense of the scale of the impact of these increased costs. It does not necessarily mean that this is how people would end up with extra spending. It also assumes that all supermarkets and businesses pass on the full costs directly to the consumer. Depending on the level of competition in the market, that may not necessarily be the case.

It is true that one of the big concerns of the paper was that the majority of the costs arising from these extra checks and regulations are falling on food imports and exporters from agricultural and food sectors. They are not evenly spread across products. It has always been a concern on the export side that this is falling quite heavily on our exporters in the agrifood sector and it is also true on the import side that costs are falling quite heavily on the grocery side. That is why it affects lower income households more, as typically they spend more of their income on basic necessities and grocery bills.

In that context, as there was mention of the pandemic unemployment payment, it is important to mention that much of the work we did was pre-Covid. We were doing much work on the impact on the economy of Brexit while the economy was otherwise performing extremely strongly. Now Brexit is coming into an economy that is much weaker, with a much higher unemployment rate, as has been mentioned.

On the specific element of the Bank of England and the potential flow of capital to the North, my understanding is that even with full recognition of financial services trade, opening a bank account in a different jurisdiction comes with additional regulations. I am not an expert on that point.