Professor Tobias Lock:

I thank the committee for the invitation. I will restrict myself to four points that emerged from my research on lessons for Ireland from German unification.

Apologies to everybody but obviously this is a lawyer's assessment. The first lesson is that reunification is not a purely domestic process but a process that happens in an international setting. Reunification would require international negotiations to be carried out, most notably bilateral ones between Ireland and the UK, but also multilateral ones at EU level. The German experience suggests that the bilateral negotiations with the UK may well go beyond the technicalities of a sovereignty transfer. For instance, the Soviet Union - which I do not want to compare to the UK either - secured a guarantee that its land reforms, which were carried out after the Second World War and which were basically expropriations of big landowners, could not be challenged legally into perpetuity. Likewise, the UK might ask Ireland to commit to certain protections for its citizens or for those with a British heritage, which even subsequent constitutional amendments cannot remove.

The second point is that ambitions of constitutional reform can derail easily. There is a lot of talk about a new Ireland, and many people seem to assume that Irish unity would result in fundamental constitutional change. German reunification left the German constitution largely unamended. Time pressures and a lack of political appetite meant that the ambitions of a new constitution, harboured in particular by many in East Germany, did not materialise. The compromise found was to commit to a constitutional review on the treaty on unity between East and West Germany, but that review ended up producing not much change at all. The consequence has been that Germany continues to be governed by the old West German constitution to this day.

Third, the unification of two legal orders is a gigantic task and techniques employed in the German context could be usefully employed in Ireland. It would be impractical for a united Ireland to operate two entirely different legal orders into the future. Hence, a merger would most probably need to happen as it did in Germany. In Germany the direction of travel was very clear and evident. East German law was ditched and replaced with West German law, but the choices in the Irish context would not be so obvious. For instance, who is to say that Irish family law as it is is evidently better than its Northern Irish equivalent? Difficult choices would need to be made. It is unlikely these would be complete on the day of unification. The techniques employed in Germany such as general clauses, front-loading, transitional periods, phasing in and out, temporary and permanent exceptions, instructions to the legislature, and so on should be carefully studied and employed here. German reunification was quite expensive. We do not know by how much but it was expensive. A solidarity tax was introduced, initially only for one year but it is still in place today and only slowly being phased out. It is perhaps a warning.

My final point is that Ireland's State capacity would come under enormous stress. The German state managed to reunify at lightning speed. It was 11 months from the fall of the Berlin Wall to unification. It placed the civil service, the legislature and all other state bodies under enormous pressure. The same would be true for Ireland but just with a much smaller State apparatus. It would have to answer as many legal and political questions as Germany did 32 years ago. Consider also that West Germany's population was 12 times the size of Ireland's and with a commensurate state apparatus. Therefore, preparation is really the key.