Mr. Dan O'Brien:

I thank the Deputy for his questions. One of the reasons I did not mention mitigation is that it is very difficult to do much to mitigate this. We are a small country. It will be extremely difficult for us to do anything about whatever changes come about. As my colleague said before we came in, the best mitigation is to have no Brexit. That brings me to the Deputy's second question. I think everyone agrees, even the pro-Brexit people in UK, that this would be an enormously complex operation; to take a country out of the EU and unscramble all of the eggs that have been scrambled over the past 40 years and have a completely new arrangement with the EU is an unprecedented thing to do. The falling back on the WTO position is also uncertain because of the nature of the WTO and the uncertainty and unprecedented nature of an EU member state which is a member of the WTO but whose membership has only been in the context of EU membership for so long. It is even unclear how that option would play out for Britain, given the complexity of that and the economic costs, which will become more apparent as the months passed and as the Article 50 process takes place over the next few years. We can also take a reading of UK domestic politics in terms of interest groups, which did not run a very good remain campaign.

As happened here after the referenda on the Lisbon and Nice treaties, the second time around interest groups ran much better information campaigns when they realised just how big the consequences would be. There are also the regional constitutional dynamics within the UK. It would be easy to foresee, two years down the line, a situation whereby, due to their sheer complexity, the negotiations run into the ground, the costs of leaving become much more apparent to British public opinion and momentum grows for a second referendum either to reverse the result of the first or to have a vote on the actual exit options that are agreed, namely, either to stay in or to accept the options. There is quite a high probability that it will not happen at all.