Dr. Seamus McGuinness:

The question of how close it is to €3 billion depends on the €3 billion of this that is related to pensions and what happens around that. There is a bit of a debate on that issue.

My view is that there are existing treaty arrangements between the UK and the EU relating to the mutual obligation of social security payments. That does not exist, for example, with respect to the Scottish debate. There is also existing practice where people have accumulated national insurance contributions in the UK and are subsequently claiming their pensions in another jurisdiction. My view is that the pension arrangement would be still a matter for negotiation because national insurance does not give someone a defined right to a pension but there are reasons to believe that would be the case.

However, I will go back to the point. Subvention is a bit of a red herring in this situation. The argument around subvention believes there will be a border poll that ratifies reunification, that this is the number for subvention and this is the number that will be consumed into the Irish Exchequer ad infinitum.

That could be the case, I suppose, if you want to have an unimaginative view of what reunification would look like that says we have low productivity in Northern Ireland that drives this need for subvention and we are just going to do nothing, we will just go along and we will keep it as it is and that subvention will run into the future. That is not the way policy should look at this. Policy should say the subvention is an issue driven by low productivity. Low productivity is not set in stone; it can be fixed. The planning for reunification should therefore let us have a managed move to reunification if the Border poll ratifies that option and let us decide what is the appropriate period over which that should take place. Is it two years? Is it five years? Is it ten years? What are the policy options we have in order to address Northern Ireland's low productivity during that transition period? How much would it cost, and in what order should those policy levers be addressed? At the end of that scenario, subvention is no longer an issue if Northern Ireland productivity has been raised sufficiently. Then the process should be designed in that way to benefit everyone rather than to take subvention as something set in stone in the sense that low productivity will always be the scenario for the North's economy and the Irish Exchequer will just take care of that into the future. Concentrating on the subvention figure misses the bigger picture and misses something that would be addressed by proper planning.