Professor John FitzGerald:

All right. Separate out the debt. On pensions, we on this island, North and South, and people on the other island have social insurance systems. The pensions are not funded. The pension payments are funded by the contributions made every year. If Northern Ireland joins a united Ireland, everybody in Northern Ireland will continue to pay social insurance contributions and these will go to Dublin. Those are the contributions that would have gone to pay the pensions in Northern Ireland. It seems most unlikely that when the revenue is going to Dublin, the United Kingdom would continue to pay those pensions.

There are special arrangements that were put in place 50 years ago, partly under EU auspices, to allow labour mobility where people can aggregate their social insurance across countries. However, if all the revenue that currently funds the pensions in Northern Ireland goes to Dublin, for the UK to continue to pay the pensions is unlikely.

The debt is a different matter. The Deputy is right it is not necessarily a legal liability, but when Ireland left the United Kingdom in 1922 part of the deal was we would accept a share of the debt. That was subsequently written off in 1925 as part of a subsequent deal. I will not go into the details of that.