Professor Katy Hayward:

We try to be optimistic because this has been going on for a long time and it is easy to despair. People are saying that the tone is different in the relationship at UK-EU level. The tone is significant but it is not enough. We will see fairly soon the degree to which a qualitative shift has taken place.

I will also respond to Deputy Richmond's points. To some degree the UK position has moved to wanting to see a constructive outcome and agreement. In part because the UK has engaged more closely with stakeholders in Northern Ireland as result of its process in preparing for potential secondary legislation related to the Northern Ireland protocol Bill. As members will know, that is a skeletal Bill. It will exclude certain provisions of the protocol and the idea is that regulations would be put forward by Ministers using delegated powers instead of the provisions of the protocol. Much of this is quite technical, including issues relating to regulatory alignment, etc. As a result of trying to prepare for those, UK officials across different departments have engaged with businesses both in GB and Northern Ireland to try to collect evidence to see what might work. When you engage with people who know what they are talking about, you realise the complexity of the challenge. An awareness of that has fed up to the decision makers and the negotiators in this process. If that is matched equally by evidence on the part of the EU - it will be difficult - I hope they will be able to find a way forward on that.

That relates to the point about stakeholder engagement. With my colleague, Dr. Milena Komarova, I have submitted proposals to the UK and EU negotiating teams on stakeholder engagement. This is based on a lot of engagement and liaison with various stakeholder organisations in Northern Ireland and across the Border. A key approach is to use the model of the domestic advisory groups that exist in all EU agreements to consider what would work best in Northern Ireland, given the particular complexity and looking at different sectors. One element we consider important is to involve not only the stakeholders, but to have a standing panel of experts. The importance of information must be recognised in the continual decision making that will have to be done, ultimately at the joint committee, but also at the specialist committee and in what the joint consultative working group is processing.

On the democratic deficit, it is too easy to overlook the role of the Northern Ireland Assembly. Let us hope that the Assembly resumes its functions before too long. Things do not look good at the moment.

The MLAs have a consent vote to which Professor Phinnemore alluded. However, there is a possibility of having a committee in the Northern Ireland Assembly that would be explicitly established to process the information coming through from the joint consultative working group because at the moment that process is happening only in Westminster in terms of formal scrutiny of the areas of EU law which Northern Ireland must be seen to be aligned with, so there is a gap there that needs to be addressed. On the strand three institutions, I am aware the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly, committee A, produced an excellent report recently on consolidating the bilateral relationship, recognising the challenges in this post-Brexit context. I must stress, as I mentioned at the start, we must not overlook how much more difficult it will be, so it is absolutely right to identify challenges with respect to the lack of informal engagement and formal engagement with UK and EU ministers and officials. More specifically, the transformation of the regulatory environment within the UK, including significant divergence from EU rules, will potentially have such implications not just for Great Britain and Northern Ireland, GBNI, but also North-South on the island of Ireland. There is potential for the strand three and, hopefully, the strand two institutions also to manage that. It will require a step change in not just their capacity but in the information they are getting. In a funny way, just as post-Brexit border controls require better communication on either side of those borders, similarly, post-Brexit, UK-EU, east-west and North-South relations will have had better communication between the relevant institutions than ever existed before because there is so much now that we cannot take for granted.