Professor John Doyle:

If there were a medium growth trajectory, that is, if we were not among the high performers in central Europe in terms of when they joined the European Union but in the middle range, meaning a growth of about 2% above historical norms, we would need to borrow €2.5 billion in year 1, and in year 10, we would have a surplus. It would drop pretty evenly. Obviously, this would be subject to political decisions about issues that cost money. In year 1, it would be a borrowing requirement of about 0.75% and that would drop consistently over a decade. That, in some ways, would not require any taxation increase at all. The State could readily borrow that money and repay it over 40 years, with a negligible increase in taxation. We would also assume that the Northern economy would be growing and people would be earning more and paying more taxes, which is fundamentally why the subvention would disappear, that is, not because we would be cutting public expenditure but because we would be raising taxes.

Turning to another option that has been discussed, in the most recent opinion poll we carried out as part of the ARINS project, we asked people what their appetite was for putting away some of the current surpluses into a sovereign wealth fund. It has been done for climate and other issues, but this related to parking some of it for the cost of a united Ireland. We would be talking about saving at a cost of, say, €10 million or €20 million from now until whenever a border poll is held, and if a border poll did not happen after 20-odd years, we could spend it on something else. That would not be a huge sum if we were saving it in the context of the surpluses we are currently generating, and I suspect the Department of Finance would prefer us to do that than spend our money in a way that would be hard to curtail if the economy goes in the other direction, because it is better to put it away when there is a surplus. A majority of those who had an opinion were in favour of that sort of measure.

It is very hard to carry out opinion polls on increasing taxation because, no matter what the topic is, nobody thinks they should personally pay more tax. There is always someone else in the country who is unfairly paying too little. Even on development aid, almost nobody in Ireland is against increasing development aid spending. I have looked at this in the past. If we survey them to see whether they would pay more tax to increase development aid, they say "No" because they think the taxation system is personally unfair and that somebody else should pay it. It is just not a tool we have at our disposal. Nobody has come up with a good way to ask that question, but the sovereign fund was a little less personal and, on that question, there was an appetite to put public money away to pay for future costs.