Dr. Alan Barrett:

If I can just add to that, Senator Black posed a question with regard to research priorities. I believe much of this discussion is around the mechanisms as to how this will happen. A certain amount of work and knowledge of the economy and the societies North and South is in place but the very tough stuff here is the granular public administration type work on how to merge the health and education systems, and all those sorts of things. There are also cost implications here. This is not so much about the subvention but simply looking at welfare rates in Ireland versus the North - the committee is made up of politicians who know more about this - I would imagine that most people would understand that if one is going to do this, the expectation is that one will converge to the higher rate and not the lower one. What then are the implications of this?

Dr. McGuinness has already mentioned that the tax systems North and South are very different. We exempt a large number of lower income people from taxation. Again, what will be done about that? There are costs associated with that which we can project and think about with regard to the implications of that. This is granular and it will be tricky work with costs attached to it. I believe that when putting the roadmap in place, it will be around those sorts of issues. I would see those as the research priorities from here on out.