Dr. Alan Barrett:

We can but, ultimately, people will differ even as to whether or not this is a grey area and whether there would be a legal obligation on the British Government to pay for pensions for a group of people for ever more. I will just make the point that sane and sensible people can disagree on this.

On the Deputy's question about areas of growth, I would take a very different approach to it. To a great extent, what one would like to see happen is that we get the sorts of issues around education organised appropriately - some of the work that was done in the institute on foreign direct investment, for example - and start thinking about the island of Ireland rather than just the South as a destination for foreign direct investment. There is the complication about the different corporate tax regimes, but even if there were a greater spread of economic activity across the island, in a sense we would not have to start wondering about what the specific sectors are. We just want the conditions to be put in place for economic activity to grow. Back to Deputy Feighan's point, maybe instead of people just moving to Carrick-on-Shannon or wherever, they would be moving north of the Border. It is really more about getting in place the conditions, which are a mix of appropriate education, infrastructural investment, R&D investment and a range of other things. There is no doubt but that greater political stability in Northern Ireland would help from an investment perspective. I think a range of things could click into gear, without necessarily identifying the narrow sectors in which we think this would happen.