Professor Seamus McGuinness:

On the financial debate, we have not touched on this in a while but our initial estimates of subvention, depending on how negotiations go, in our work in the Cambridge Journal of Economics, estimated that between 39% and 74% of the subvention costs could come across to the Irish State, depending on what happens with the pensions bill. Professor Doyle has done a more forensic deep dive on that. Based on our Cambridge Journal of Economics paper, we estimate a bottom threshold of €3.6 billion in core subvention starting to an upper level of €6.8 billion starting, which translates to a lower estimate in our published work of €4 billion up to €7.2 billion. That lower threshold is what Government spending would typically increase by in a year, particularly before the Covid crisis. It would not result in any particular reduction in living standards for the Irish population in our view but we point to the fact of the matter that those are the costs if you take the North over as is, do nothing and leave it in a state of low productivity growth.