Professor John FitzGerald:

That point is important. At the moment, there is huge transfer from the people of Dublin to the people of Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan. People take that for granted and do not worry about it. If there were a separate executive in the North, it would make utterly transparent a very large transfer, which would lead people in Galway immediately to say they were being screwed for Northern Ireland. That issue of hiding the transfers, to which everybody buys in within a unitary state, would arise.