Professor John FitzGerald:

On the British debt, my understanding is the file on the 1925 agreement between the Irish Free State and the United Kingdom was retrieved by the UK Treasury in the month before the Scottish independence referendum, and its view was that Scotland was not going to get away with what the Free State had got away with. It is interesting that during those negotiations, at one stage when the Irish had left the room, Lord Birkenhead said the Irish could not afford to pay, and as soon as he said that, the UK caved in and allowed the Free State to get away without the debt. The inability to pay was important.

I like Mr. Hazzard's idea of dividing up the assets if we were to take the liabilities. I want the UK Embassy in Washington for the Irish State, and I would pick a few other nice embassies. We have a good one in Paris. We do not want the Falkland Islands or Saint Helena, although it should be said the Free State looked at borrowing Saint Helena to put De Valera and the republicans on it but wisely did not go down that route. Creating a Napoleon would have been unwise. In any event, Mr. Hazzard is correct. We would divide up the assets, but the UK assets are tiny relative to the liabilities, as is the case for Ireland. Who knows what would happen? It would be a matter for negotiation.

If we think about how Irish unification would happen, the trigger would be a referendum in Northern Ireland. We would then have to work out in detail what had happened and we would have to have a referendum in the Republic. Would we negotiate with Britain before the referendum in the Republic or after it? In either case, once Northern Ireland had voted for unification, our negotiation position would have been weakened because we would be going ahead with it whatever happened, if we got agreement from the people of the Republic. I do not know what would happen. Is the figure €1.5 billion? It is not massive. The big one is the re-rating of social welfare and so on.

On the pensions question, the way I look at it is that, currently, people pay social insurance contributions in a country and those are used to pay for pensions. In a united Ireland, people in Northern Ireland would be making social insurance contributions in the united Ireland, not in the UK, but to expect the UK to continue to pay for all the pensions, when it would not be getting the revenue, is unreasonable. In the settlement of 1921, in the context of the unemployment insurance fund, the Irish side never suggested that because we had paid into the fund, the UK was liable. I think it is most improbable, therefore, on the pensions. There is a possibility that, in negotiation, we would get away without the debt.