Professor John Doyle:

We have done a great deal of work over the past three years between the universities and the ESRI. We are in a very different place than we were after Brexit when, in reality, we could not have answered any of these questions for the committee at all. Much progress has been made. As Professor McGuinness said, while the experience in Scotland was different, the authorities there did publish a 650-page document that was available to the public. It was actually about 1,000 pages if we take all the reports into consideration. The biggest single criticism, and possibly the reason they lost the referendum, was that there was not enough information available. They did not answer the currency question, they did not answer the pensions questions and they did not deal with a few basic things. Rather than people telling us they were overwhelmed with information, they said that it was all very welcome. This meant that there were issues and that the public just wanted someone to think about it. Agricultural policy probably did not feature in the debate to even half of 1%, but had nobody indicated what they were going to do. If they had, it might have been all over the papers. There was a sense that the public just wanted the assurance that somebody had talked about all those sorts of things, and then the public debate could focus on the narrower range. I am aware there are political sensitivities and interparty differences in terms of the timing of it but a Green Paper or some government equivalent from an Oireachtas committee narrows the range and allows people to take part in a discussion that is not based on a blue-sky reading of what to talk about. It would be a case of presenting a list and then focusing the one range. An Oireachtas committee or a Government Green Paper does that service to the community. It puts it out there and outlines the range.

It is also clear from focus groups in particular that the public do not want to be handed a model today. They do not want some civil servant group to go off, do a technical operation and say that it is a case of deciding either "Yes" or "No". The public would say that no thought had been given to gender equality, that biodiversity had not been considered, etc. People do want a draft and a Green Paper or Oireachtas committee report. In some aspects, it is the classic way for a government or parliament to outline what the political system thinks in broad terms and then ask what the public, lobby groups, academics and others think. In some ways, we have gone as far as we can with the informal debate. We now need a different scale, with something like a formal report by means of which we seek to put it all together. It would move the conversation on in a very different way.