Mr. Fergal O'Brien:

I thank the Chair and Senator Blaney. I will give an initial response and I know Mr. D'Arcy will join in as we progress. I will start with the questions about the macroeconomic model. It is technical modelling work and requires the specialist expertise that we have in the likes of the ESRI, and its counterpart in the UK, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, NIESR. We are working with some very experienced people in the development of that modelling so it is quite advanced at this stage. We are struggling with some of the data gaps, particularly for the Northern Ireland economy. It is an ongoing challenge and the data gap and coverage of statistics for Northern Ireland is one of the issues that has come up. However, they have been able to address that quite effectively through a modelling exercise so we are very confident it will be a really important contribution to the understanding of the economy.

The Senator asked who was involved. As I said, we have a steering group which has a mainly economic speciality to date. We will talk about the work we need to do in terms of the dissemination. We have some economists and academics from Northern Ireland and there are some specialists from the UK. Both Mr. D'Arcy and myself are on that steering group as well. I chair the steering group and Mr. D'Arcy contributes to it along with other professionals from the ESRI. That is the input, and we are then engaging with stakeholders as we go.

I mentioned the trade report that is being developed as part of this research exercise with the ESRI. We published that trade report just before the summer and very actively reached out to stakeholders to join that conversation and to see the results of that trade report. This was very innovative because for the first time from a Northern Ireland data perspective, we now have trade data with EU countries. Northern Ireland is now reporting much more detailed trade data to the EU as a result of Brexit. There is a lot of additional data and statistics coming into it but the publication of that work is allowing us to engage with other stakeholders and obviously with organisations like the Confederation of British Industry, the chambers of commerce and Manufacturing Northern Ireland. At the moment, it remains quite a technical piece of work. We are progressing it through that steering group.