Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

There is no date agreed yet for publication. That is for two reasons. I have appointed the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Deputy Coveney. He will have special responsibility for co-ordinating the whole-of-government response to Brexit. Our new people may need some days or a week or two to determine how exactly we are going to develop that document.

One of the difficulties in developing such a document is that we do not yet know the nature of Brexit. We have not yet decided whether we are going to predict what Brexit will look like and base the response for each sector on one particular outcome or whether we are going to take five or six or four or three potential Brexit outcomes and try to respond to each of those potential outcomes on a sectoral basis. That is difficult to do because Brexit with the absence of a free trade agreement is very different to Brexit that has a free trade agreement.

The United Kingdom has indicated that it still intends to leave the customs union and the Single Market. However, those involved seem to want to negotiate a new UK EU free trade agreement that would not leave them far off something not dissimilar to being in the customs union and in elements of the Single Market. We have to decide whether the document is going to predict what Brexit means and then have our sectoral response to it or whether we are going to have five or six different scenarios for what Brexit might mean and then have different sectoral responses to each potential outcome. That is a decision we have yet to make.

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