Dr. Seamus McGuinness:

Those assertions are all true. The reason we got involved in this work is we saw the amount of lies, and misinformation, involved in the Brexit debate. We thought that a border poll is now more likely and inevitable because the Brexit debate has resulted in shifts in political beliefs and demographics. Our paper was published in the Cambridge Journal of Economics recommends that we need to set out what is required for an honest referendum that avoids the worst mistakes of Brexit. At the time of writing that document, if someone had asked anybody about North-South differences, they would have said that the North has higher living standards, a better education system and a better health service, all of which have been proven to be false assumptions so the argument about how North would have been characterised five years is very different. That is only different because the facts, which are verifiable and independent, have been produced that demonstrate that people's assumption about how things work on both sides of the Border were, in general, not correct. Irrespective of how we got there, the North has been a net contributor to the British Treasury but only up until 1935 so it has received some level of subsidy for a very long time. We could discuss all day how the North has reached the current situation. We must continue the work of equipping people with the real facts as they stand on the ground so that as a border poll approaches, people can be certain about how the relativities sit in terms of welfare, living standards, education, etc., on both sides of the Border. Then they need to know what is the plan, which is the bit that is missing.