Mr. John McGrane:

On how we should plan and what our contingency is, certain things are possible including how well we work together. For example, the conversation at national level needs to involve the public sector, Government officials, the private sector and civic society. The structures to run the conversation will be quite important. As has been alluded to and as everybody knows, this is a massively complex series of matters for us all to consider in the weeks, months and years ahead. It is not like anything else that has been done in recent times and, therefore, thinking about how we will have the conversations necessary to source information, to inform negotiators, to feed back, to test scenarios, to get impact analyses, etc. will be very important. Now would be a good time to think about the structures for those conversations.

As an example of one of the myriad line items that will come forward, in the education sector there is a significant opportunity now for Ireland to think about the loss of EU-funded research currently done through UK universities - including universities in Northern Ireland - which are at risk of losing significant funding straightaway rather than in time as a result of what has been determined in the referendum. Those universities have an opportunity to partner with other universities so that the opportunities are not totally lost. There is a strategic opportunity for Ireland to think how Irish universities might pick up some of that very valuable work. That is not without many operational issues and concerns, but now is a good time to run the scenario planning over what it might entail, how it might work and who would need to work with whom both in the sector itself and in other areas surrounding the sector. The Cassels report on how the university sector is funded in the long term suddenly takes on a new importance because there is no point in us telling the world we are open for new research business in universities whose future funding base is not yet assured.

All of that speaks to a national strategic approach to dealing with the short-term, immediate great burdens on exporters, for instance, but also beginning to think in the medium and long term about a change of regime for this country that is as big as when we joined the EU or indeed when we gained independence. This is a massive project and we need massive project management to deal with it very well.