Dr. Tom Healy:

I will first deal with the regional question. As already stated, there is likely to be a stronger negative impact outside Dublin and this also will impact on small and medium-sized enterprises. The agrifood sector, in particular, could be very severely impacted with aggregate job losses being significantly higher than 20,000. I refer to the multiplier effect in this regard, not just in the Border area and the north west, but in the south west and south east, where many enterprises are heavily UK-orientated and would be very adversely affected, particularly in the dairy and beef sector.

Brexit is challenging but Dublin may do well out of Brexit. There is an upside to Brexit but it is much more likely to be concentrated in the bigger cities, particularly Dublin.

With Brexit there is a greater risk of social and economic inequality. For example, the demand for low-skilled workers could be affected, vis-à-visthe supply of low-skilled workers. Wage inequality could increase if there was higher unemployment in particular sectors and among particular low-skilled categories of workers. There would be a social impact immediately.

We have not touched on another important regional issue of which we are very conscious as an all-island research body. The impact regionally on Northern Ireland will be worse than in any other UK region. That will have spillover impacts, particularly in Border areas, but also in the construction sector because there are very close ties between the construction sectors in the South and North. At the moment there is a certain degree of migration of labour taking place and one can see it in some of the new developments that are taking place in and around Dublin. The impact on the construction sector will, possibly, be quite severe and we cannot underestimate the potential for inward migration and businesses in the North relocating to the Republic. We must also be concerned about the impact on housing and on the general economy and society of Northern Ireland as a region that is closely allied to the Republic.

As for measurement issues, we were asked whether we were surprised there had been so little analysis in the construction and housing area. I do not think so. The work undertaken in 2015 by the ESRI tells us pretty much what we need to know about the larger possible economic impact of Brexit. Let us remember that it was done before the Brexit referendum. The Copenhagen Economics study of February 2018 does not say a great deal more than had already been signalled in the 2015 exercise. While it is true that nothing specific has been done on housing and construction in any of the larger studies and that is certainly a gap, the difficulty there is that we do not really know how this is going to shake out in terms of inward investment and migration. The CSO has projected population figures on various assumptions with migration ranging from 10,000 net inward migrants per annum up to a maximum of 30,000 net inward migrants per annum to the year 2030. Those are probably conservative estimates or assumptions and we could be looking at much higher effects. One final point to bear in mind is that public services broadly will be impacted, including education and health. It is not just housing. All of these factors are, of course, interrelated.

The question of how to be ready falls to be addressed. There are two different approaches or emphases which can be adopted here. Groups like the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, IFAC, and the ESRI underline the importance of prudence, in particular fiscal prudence because of the uncertainties around Government revenue in light of any slowdown. However, our emphasis is a little different and is on the importance of ramping up investment, which is to say targeted, quality investment in key areas. I give a practical example. If one wants to order a kitchen from Germany, the chances are that the bits and pieces will be transported across the English landbridge. We have to think about Cork Port, Waterford's Belview Port, which is connected by rail, and Rosslare, which is a roll-on, roll-off facility. We have to think about the hard infrastructure to facilitate trade to move more freely. We must also get out of fossil fuels more quickly than planned because a major proportion of our crude oil and gas comes through the UK. We must be mindful of the need to take action on climate issues in any case. While Brexit has complicated our lives immensely, it has challenged us to adopt as a matter of urgency the social and economic policies we should have been implementing anyway. The urgency is greater now that we are faced with this prospect of an unknown outcome in five months' time.