Professor Seamus McGuinness:

It is also important to state that in the German situation, East Germany had obviously been run under a Soviet-style planning system so by the time the Berlin Wall came down, there were huge structural gaps between the economies of East and West Germany. We pointed out that there are some structural gaps opening up between the economies of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland but nothing of that scale. Over a 20-year period, reconstruction costs in East Germany rose to something close to €2 trillion. Each situation is really a stand-alone situation. There is nowhere we can look to that is very similar and that tells us what we should do. Even with the situation in Scotland, there are things we can look at that would inform the situation, such as its planning process and the Scotland's Future documentation that was produced. This was 640 pages that told voters what the monetary fiscal industrial framework would look like and what the social policy would look like post-independence. However, even that situation is very different to here because that was where you had an entity breaking away from an entity. Here, we are talking about the amalgamation of two entities. There is really little to be gained by looking at the situation either in East Germany or Scotland. We need to plan for this process based on the facts on the ground as they currently stand North and South and that needs to be done in a systematic way that is managed and verified by government. Again, we can look at other major referendums. There was the Brexit situation where again there was no verified information, or a verifiable process to the information that was being produced, and we have seen the outcome of that. Many of those claims are now know to be false. At least when the Scottish Government was engaged in the planning and in the information-gathering process, less spurious claims were made in the run-up to that Scottish referendum. That is a lesson that we can take in how we can plan for constitutional change and the processes we need to build in systematically going forward but there is little to be learned from the East German case.