Dr. Alan Barrett:

Yes. I have a couple of points. The Northern Ireland situation is obviously fascinating. There are many sensitivities, so we must speak carefully about it. Our former colleague, Professor John FitzGerald, was writing last week about Northern Ireland's unique position, namely, that of having the capacity to trade into both Great Britain and the EU. There is fantastic economic potential in this regard. It is a most unusual situation to be in. If properly exploited, it could be very positive for Northern Ireland. As Dr. Lawless touched on, we should be very enthusiastic about this in the Republic of Ireland because one trades most closely with those who are closest to one. An economy of Northern Ireland that is doing better should be better for Ireland generally, but especially for Border regions, which the Senator has touched on.

There is a potential benefit.

To link it to a longer-term question, a number of economists have been talking recently about the fact there was much less of a peace dividend for Northern Ireland than had been anticipated. While a great degree of political stability was brought to Northern Ireland after the Good Friday Agreement, that has not translated into an economic rejuvenation to the extent that might have been expected. In fact, prior to Brexit happening, many people were getting more optimistic that Northern Ireland would move into the next phase of normalisation, which would have been the economic rejuvenation. Brexit has now created difficulties in that, but the protocol is there and the benefits are possible, given what it has done for Northern Ireland.

One of the reasons it may not be successful, however, is that if businesses are in any way fearful that the protocol will not survive, it is highly unlikely that many of them will invest and try to take advantage of Northern Ireland's unique position. I will not comment on the rights or wrongs of the protocol as such, but the one advantage it holds out is this unique trading possibility. That will not come to fruition if there is great uncertainty about the protocol, which would be unfortunate. I am not really qualified to go into the full intricacies of this. If the Brexit referendum taught us anything, it is that issues of identity trump economics on a good number of occasions. Even if people are arguing about dimensions of the protocol that are not the narrow economic ones I am discussing, we must understand and respect that.

On the Ireland-UK link, for the longest time Irish forecasters in the Republic of Ireland would look to what was happening in the UK economy. Obviously, if the UK economy was growing, Ireland would grow. That link is much weaker than it was previously, but it is still there. As Dr. Lawless pointed out, there was always the sense that Brexit was going to be bad for the UK economy, so even if nothing else happened, there was a sense that it was going to be bad for the Irish economy. On this question of how significant the UK would be for Ireland economically into the future and how much potential is there, again we are back to this word "uncertainty". If we see this regulatory divergence between the EU and the UK in the coming months and years, one can imagine a situation in which trading into the UK will get increasingly burdensome for Irish firms. It could be the case that the decline over time that we have seen in Irish exports going to the UK, to the extent we have had this decline in the share of the total, could accelerate, if anything. However, the point I was making earlier about trying to maintain as many positive links as possible still holds.