Dr. Martina Lawless:

The Senator makes an important point. There has been a very substantial and quite quick change to a lot of trade patterns.

This has happened with astonishingly little disruption, and certainly not visible disruption to consumers, by way of interruptions to supplies. That speaks very strongly also to the resilience and flexibility of the businesses dealing with it and to much of the preparations that had been put in place by transport authorities and the Revenue Commissioners preparing for this eventuality before they even fully understood what was going to happen. The deal was signed very late in the day, in December of 2020, so people were preparing for something they did not quite know the shape of, but this just shows a great deal of preparation and work had been put in place. The level of disruption was surprisingly minimal given the extent of the shifts.

We saw in our numbers where we mentioned that the falls in trade were particularly stark in January and February where people were, perhaps, learning a bit about the processes and trying to avoid or delay some transactions while they got to grips with the new procedures, but by March or April trade had gone back up a little bit and has since stabilised. Perhaps that is the extent of the Brexit impact but there was a little bit of an extra effect in January and February. This largely speaks to a very big change in economic relationships which is going very smoothly.

On the Great Britain to Northern Ireland checks, which have obviously been the big focus of political attention, while there have been many moves to lighten those checks, there were many grace periods already in place. Many of the decisions talked about now are not so much about removing checks but about the continuation in perpetuity of the grace periods that had been in place. As I said, we do not have as much information, or it is very limited, on the trade flows between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. There is therefore something of a gap in our knowledge of all of the different directions of trade there.

In that context it is interesting that what we have seen of trade between Ireland and Northern Ireland is a very large increase in imports from Northern Ireland coming into Ireland. This seems to be very much the attractiveness of sourcing products in Northern Ireland rather than in Great Britain because of the increased checks that have been put in place there. We have seen some increase in trade going from Ireland to Northern Ireland but it has increased by a much smaller amount. This suggests that goods going into Northern Ireland are still being sourced in perhaps more or less the same direction. This suggests - this is somewhat speculative as I do not have data on what is going from Great Britain into Northern Ireland - that most of that trade is still flowing reasonably smoothly because we have not seen any great shift in supply in terms of Northern Ireland massively increasing what it buys from Ireland and the EU to replace goods from Great Britain. All of the change in trade from Northern Ireland has been in respect of it selling more into Ireland and the EU markets rather than it having to buy more from these markets. This suggests Northern Ireland is trading smoothly in both directions, which is very much what we are talking about in regard to Northern Ireland having the best of both worlds and having access to both economic areas at the same time.

On the Border region, any increased investment in Northern Ireland, taking advantage of its special access to both markets, would have quite clear positive spillover benefits to all of the surrounding Border region in terms of the supply linkages that exist between neighbouring counties and the kind of free labour market that also exists in that area. Any increased investment and growth in the Northern Ireland economy is very much to the entire benefit of the island, and especially of benefit perhaps to the Border counties where there would be some kind of positive spillover and where it would impact more directly.