Mr. John McGrane:

Go raibh maith agat, a Chathaoirligh. I feel like the man who, if he had more time, would have written a shorter letter in terms of the challenges of summarising. Understanding that all of the contributors here today share many points in common and that the data are also well understood, I will come at this from the point of view of the organisation that I have the privilege of leading.

The British Irish Chamber of Commerce is a trade body. We are for the championing of trade between the two islands, Britain and Ireland, and for the more than 400,000 jobs that are sustained by the trade corridor between the islands today. It is not just about employers and the employment creation, it is about what that does in civic society. It is those jobs and those investments by employers that create well-being throughout the two islands. It is about the security that it gives to all. I might extract one or two passages of relevance to that theme and then draw out a couple of observations.

In our submission, we noted from our perspective the huge powerhouse for research that is the UK. That is what is in play here alongside Ireland's response to it, which has been commented upon by the practitioners in the sector. I will insert one or two points. The UK is currently involved in more Horizon 2020 projects than any other country in Europe. Last year, UK universities received about £1 billion in research grants and contracts from EU sources. The most immediate impact of Brexit for the sector, as has been referenced, has been the anecdotal evidence that UK researchers have been dropped as partners from collaborative projects.

There are also collaborations between the UK and Ireland in this space. Collaborations between academics from different countries are immensely important as they tend to lead to research with greater impact. The Royal Society in the UK notes that between 2005 and 2014, there were 16,655 co-authored papers between academics in the UK and Ireland. As previously outlined, the biggest concern for the UK academic community is whether British academics will still be able to collaborate across EU borders with their European peers, including those in Ireland. UK and Irish research institutions also collaborate extensively under such programmes. There are currently in excess of 900 collaborative links under Horizon 2020. Since the commencement of Horizon 2020, 13% of all successfully funded Irish research projects have included at least one UK-based partner. In the past 12 months, that number has risen to about 40%. We are massively intertwined in these matters.

What would we say about all of that backdrop and the other things that have been submitted? The first thing we would say is that we should never waste a good crisis. We have a crisis. Our neighbour has a crisis of democratic making which now sees a trapping inside a walled UK economy and community of massive research power, intellectual property, operational knowledge and capability to collaborate. That is now trapped. It is not a long-term thing. It is not two years or ten years away. It is second only to foreign currency collapse and the effect on mushroom farmers on Ireland. This is one of the most immediate manifestations of the downside of Brexit for everybody involved, not just for the UK. It is not just anecdotal.

The patron of the British Irish Chamber of Commerce is Mr. Niall FitzGerald, one of Ireland's greatest living industrialists and employment creators, who careered in Unilever and chaired Reuters. What is little known, apart from his chairing of Munster Rugby, God bless him, is the fact that he is the president of the Leverhulme Trust, which curates a €4 billion legacy of Lord Lever, the soapmaker, to foster education and research in Britain. Parts of that €4 billion are dispensed every year to wonderful research projects, many of which collaborate with Irish researchers, Irish third level institutes and European institutes. In that capacity, Mr. FitzGerald would tell the committee that there is not a week that goes by in which he does not get a call from a vice chancellor in a UK university saying that they are in crisis, not two or ten years away but now, because researchers are feeling a very cold wind of change and feeling very unwelcome inside the UK today.

They are unwelcome. The question is: are we ready? As has been referenced by Mr. Brian MacCraith and others, there is a legitimate capacity question and a digestibility question here. We would go further. We were recently proud to take a request from the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Brendan Carr, to produce a small piece of work, both in literature form and in video form, called "Greater Dublin is Greater Than Ever", to counter a spinning campaign in the UK and beyond that says that Dublin and Ireland would not be ready to take investment by banks, educational establishments, other employment creators and other value creators and that we do not have enough offices, homes, a regulator with the right amount of will and capacity, and international baccalaureate schools.

These concerns have all been relayed to me personally inside meeting rooms in London and the rest of Britain. Most of it has some traceability to some anecdotal truth, but most of it is wrong in quantum, data and currency, as in, how current is the information. Most of it is outdated. Therefore, we have been telling people that Dublin does have offices and will have by the time they get here. We have been telling them that Dublin has educational capacity and it will have it by the time they get here. We have been telling them that it has international baccalaureate capacity coming on stream beyond the very good if small number of capacity institutions that are working here today. We are delighted to see that one particular promoting group is bringing on stream an 800-seat international baccalaureate school in Dublin in just over a year's time to commence in autumn 2018.

We feel the need not just to know that this is coming but to tell people that this is coming. The first thing is perception. Perception is creating its own reality. This is an immediate burning platform right now. Educators, researchers and funders will not wait around to know what happens to Ms Theresa May's two-year negotiation space, which is likely to be several years longer than that. We are in the business of dealing with the issues but being realistic about what is possible. We must allow ourselves to think inventively. There are many other people who do not have a solution in full right now. We should gather up our portfolio of reasons Ireland can be a solution to our neighbour's legitimate problem and create, as we have announced last week through a speech given by Mr. Niall FitzGerald as patron of the chamber, the concept of an Ireland and UK powerhouse. There is nothing against our European allegiance and credentials whatsoever in this.

It recognises that Ireland is a peripheral and geographically remote piece of the European Union; a small island behind a slightly larger island with which we always have shared geography and many other shared cultural and community links. We are not forgetting these factors and for the building on these in order see what the opportunities are. I will round out by saying that on this island 50 years ago a great man, Dr. T. K. Whitaker, stepped forward into the political and public service space at a time when as an island, a country and a people Ireland had far less resources and far more uncertainty than we have today, which is considerable. He refused to dream small; he thought big and delivered big with the Seán Lemass Administration and other good politicians around the whole of the public service at that time. He said that if Ireland did not think big it would lose big. At that stage Ireland had its young people leaving on the hoof alongside our cattle. One of the primary things championed by Dr. Whitaker was the investment in our education sector. As a result Ireland has now become one of the best performing economies in the world with a tremendous foreign direct investment strategy and the clustering of smaller business development around that. All of this is underpinned by a wonderful education system, which is challenged. We now need to think what is the opportunity and what would we do if we were told that we had six months in which to win the case to be the solution - or a significant part of the solution for our neighbour's problem. What would we do in six months, not six years or 16 years? Some things will take longer, and that is appropriate, but to take a national emergency and opportunity plan view from this situation we must ask what needs to be done and to go across the water with our friends and ask what will it take for Ireland to be the next best solution for a partner island that has a problem on its hands. Education, research and third level structuring is core to what lies next. As a trade body we are proud to be associated with the great education establishments of the State and we commit to working closely with them towards that end over the coming weeks and months.