Dr. Alan Barrett:

Do not worry. It is easy to say, and it is sort of sensible, that there should be planning. There should be recognition that this is a possibility in any sort of national plan, be it a risk-type exercise or organisations working through the creation of risk registers. It is never about saying these things are absolutely going to happen. You are setting out the things that might happen and there is an onus to try to set out plans as to how the risk would be mitigated or dealt with.

The Senator is absolutely right. There is a general sort of acceptance that a border poll could happen at some point and probably will happen at some point.

The idea that we would be planning for it is sensible.

Questions on how long it would take are impossible to answer. As we touched on in some of the earlier discussions, planning would require roadmaps around the integration of various systems. Without going through all of them, we touched on the issue of social welfare pensions. Apart from that, one gets into issues on the tax treatment of pensions, North and South. People have pension pots built up. How would they be treated? That is just one issue. If one starts thinking about it one can see layers of complexity. How long it would take I do not know. That probably reinforces the notion that we should be thinking about it sooner rather than later. In the national context, that is a sensible place for it to be.

In terms of whether Departments are thinking of this, the national development plan has been mentioned. Nobody talks about a border poll, but there are references to North-South linkages in the national development plan. That is the sort of language the Government is inclined to use. It is the notion that we can benefit from North-South co-operation without mentioning things that might be threatening in any shape or form. It could in some sense be argued that the activity is embedded without being signalled to a greater extent. When Deputy Conway-Walsh asked about health, I was conscious that the ESRI was involved in projection organisations. That was very much from the perspective of the Republic.