 So, what I'd further urge you, I might hand it over to Mr. Poulks. Thank you very much and ladies and gentlemen, good evening. It's a great pleasure to see so many people here, which I'm surprised at at this time of the year and this time of the evening. So thank you very much for taking the time. I don't propose, if you don't mind, to kind of stick my head in a script. I will run through a few things and I really look forward to spend the time on questions and answers. Let me start with United Kingdom and some quick comments. The decision to hold a referendum was discretionary and not obligatory. And the choice was political and essentially that only. It was announced as a choice on the 23rd of January 2013 at a speech at Bloomberg in London by Prime Minister David Cameron. Where he said that the British people will be given a choice to stay or to leave. And where, I don't quote exactly, but where it would put the European question kind of out of the pale finally for British politics. That certainly would be a forlorn hope. This was done at a time when the United Kingdom independence party was showing a considerable vigor in the national opinion polls. And this was in a period before the European Parliament elections of 2014 and the subsequent UK general election a year later. And I think it was a tactical device to cover the flank of the Conservatives exposed to UKIP. And to calm the passions of the skeptics within the Tory party itself to buy peace this side of an election. It was a piece of master tactics and disastrous strategy. I cannot imagine it was the strategy of the Prime Minister to undermine the authority of his own period in office and to have to leave in the circumstances he did. Or to cause the same for Mr Osborne as Chancellor and so on. Second point, we've seen the effects tidied up relatively quickly in front of house in the Conservative party. So the Ancien Régime gone and a new Prime Minister and new government in. With the Brexiteers in the somewhat anomalous position of having to be front and centre for whatever happens next. And we don't know what will happen next. But even worse they don't know what they want to happen next. And so the second observation I would make is how extraordinary it was to listen to David Cameron in his speech on the 27th of June. Which was the Monday after we knew the result of the vote. And the Monday after he had announced on Friday that he planned to step down. Where he told Interalia that the best and brightest in the public service in Britain would be mobilised to figure out including how they should actually disengage with the European Union. These are my words but his words are to that essential effect. I find that I must say extraordinary that a capable public bureaucracy in a state well capable of mobilising contingency planning. And on an issue of such supreme importance to do with their own interests in all sorts of ways should literally have had no contingency plan at all. And I would offer an encounter point that on the same Friday the morning after the Taoiseach introduced and you can check it on the internet. An Irish contingency plan. It's not that we know everything. But we identify department by department all those things we're going to keep an eye out for and who's going to be doing it and what is the general shape. So no one expects the contingency plan to know everything. But to have no plan and to know nothing is seriously bad. And in my view was some kind of dereliction of duty and systemic failure. And bear in mind that this is the capital city of a G8, G10, whatever number G7. The phyllis fall in and out of that and G20 state. It is by GDP the 50 economy in the world by purchasing power to party the 90 economy in the world. It is a state of 65 million people. It is the capital city and administration that as recently as 70 years. That's a long time ago over in the life of a nation not so long as recently as 70 years ago was the centre of an empire. On which so called the sun never set and which controlled in one degree or another about two fifths of the surface of the globe. So I find all that really extraordinary. That means to come around with a new government. When will Mrs May as Prime Minister be in a position or politically willing to table on behalf of the United Kingdom. The article 50 requirement to initiate the exit process. She said she won't do it this calendar year. She hasn't said when she'll do it but I think there's a kind of an expectation if not this year then it should be early next year. And that's to play for some space to figure out the angles and to do a bit of informal checking out as to what the post divorce process might look like. To give you a summary sense we can come back in questions and detail. If any of you know in your family or among your friends anyone who ever got divorced. Let me observe just one general thing that when you get divorced you don't expect after the divorce to enjoy the same conjugal rights with your partner as before. And so this is not about then getting at your former partner. It's about the state of being married is different to the state of being divorced. And so the state of Britain out of the EU will be certainly and definitively different to the state of Britain being in it. For the simple reason to take the narrow or divorce analogy I use that life doesn't work in a way where you get to keep the conjugal rights but you get to go off and do whatever you want on the side as well. And that you've already divorced. It simply doesn't work that way. So we have to wait and see how it evolves. There's been great debate in Britain especially in the course of the campaign about what would be the new relationship. Would Britain have free trade agreements with everyone including the EU. That's an option. Would Britain form a customs union with the EU. That's an option. Would they do a Britzerland, a Switzerland kind of model in EFTA. That's an option. Would they do an EEA style model as Norway. That's an option. Would they do none of the above and not for MFN the most favored nation status under WTO. That's an option. And then some hybrid of somewhere all of the above might be something that they want to negotiate. All I would say to you when you do the SWAT analysis of what's the plus, what's the minus on each of those options. The simplest one from an Irish point of view but Britain will not be doing what they do necessarily from an Irish point of view would be Norway EEA. Because they stay in the internal market, the financial services in Britain have passporting rights etc. So those that get the good bits, they have the same set of regulations. Everything we know doesn't change and there are no tariffs. And that makes also life in this island a lot easier to do with north south flows of trade or east west flows of trade. But if you're in the EEA you have to accept as Norway does today the free movement of labour. You have to give a contribution. I'm not saying this is what it would be but if the British had to pay per capita what the Norwegians pay per capita today. They would have to pay 80% of their net contribution of today and that money wouldn't be available to use for all the other things they said they would spend it on. It might not be available because the economy shrinks but that's another question. And so all that stuff is out there and it's not at all obvious that that's what a Tory party with a 17 seat majority with a number of potential volcanic eruptions that haven't yet erupted to do with the politics of disengagement is well placed to do. So we're left guessing, they're guessing and we're guessing what all that could be. What we do know is that the desire to take back control which was at least one of the themes of the debate and at least one of the motivations for some of the people who voted no is built around some kind of concept of sovereignty different to the kind of pool sovereignty of the European Union. But the double sovereignty question that it poses has now arisen that the United Kingdom wants to get sovereignty back from the EU and its institutions causing parts of the United Kingdom to want to get more sovereignty not to be taken the same road by the European Union. So the double sovereignty question, Scotland independent or not, UK fragmented or not, question mark, is the fragmentation counterpart of the sovereignty question or two sovereignty questions, sovereignty UK to Europe and sovereignty within regions in the UK. And then you have the counterpart question of fragmentation. Scotland, Mrs. Sturgeon has placed Scotland strategically very well. But if you listen very carefully to all the words she uses, she hasn't definitively said they will have another independence referendum. She has definitively said that it could be very interesting to think about having such a referendum. And so that's an interesting piece of wriggle room. If we go back to the last Scottish referendum just a little sidebar, there was a huge white paper and if you want to read 660 pages or so of stuff, there's some really interesting stuff there. But a big part of it was how does an independent Scotland pay for itself in terms of fiscal capacity? And the big assumption was that the energy economy of Scotland would pay a lot of the bill and that at a time when the price of a barrel of Brent crude was fetching $100 a barrel. So there's a big question that hasn't gone away. It's just it's not up there at the moment. And there's the second thing. In principle any state applying to join the EU needs to be willing in principle to accept that at some future date it will join the euro. Which poses for Scotland the currency question, which is not yet even the euro question, but how could an independent Scotland with a monetary policy run by the Bank of England hope to make an engagement to eventually join the euro, which begs the question which are the intermediate space of an independent Scottish currency? So when you get into all those debates, maybe it will all happen, maybe it won't all happen if they decided to have a thing. So that's there. So we have also then of course a consequence. I won't say only of that, but it helped to trigger it. The current apparent meltdown in the Labour Party, and whether it can entirely melt down or find some kind of a new residue that can motivate itself to go on in a united way we don't know. Let me park for a moment then the political and institutional parts of the UK and add just one other comment. Everyone who's good at doing something, our Majesty's Treasury, the International Monetary Fund, the OECD, the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, the Institute of Fiscal Studies, et cetera, et cetera, the Bank of England, all said Brexit will be bad for the UK. Their numbers varied as to how bad, but it was all kind of pointing down. And this was then labelled as project fear, but it may well be as we see the PMI, so the manufacturing stuff that was published last week, which is certainly below 50 and radically down, so our orders delayed, postponed, et cetera, and other elements, that the United Kingdom indeed probably rejected a degree of project reality on the grounds of arguing that the hypothesis was project fear. And so we don't yet know the full economic consequences for the UK, but a few little numbers. The Institute of Fiscal Studies reckoned that if the UK GDP declined by merely 0.6%, that that would wipe out the entire net benefit of not contributing to the EU budget. And there's an awful lot of estimates that suggest the numbers would be much larger than 0.6%, which brings back another political problem that a lot of people also voted because they thought on Boris's boss that 350 million a week is a huge amount of money, which indeed it is. But Britain has a rebate, cap funding for farmers, research funding for universities, and some social funding, regional development funding, and rural development funding. And when you add it all up, the 350 billion has to be halved because they get half of it back, so the bit that's left over is half if a recession or a slowing economy doesn't suck that half down to zero in fiscal space terms. And when you add it all up, which is quite extraordinary, but in motions, rule the rule stuff in a referendum in a way that rationality doesn't. If you add it all up, all that is the equivalent of 1% of the public expenditure of the United Kingdom, which means 99% isn't touched by the debate. And so it's a very small little piece of ground on which to swing a very big set of emotions. I'm going to park the UK and move to Ireland. In the case of Ireland, the concerns have been, I think, already well articulated about some aspects of the Irish case, which are unique as regards a departing UK and the rest of the EU. We have a 499 long kilometer border with Northern Ireland, and we hear all the anxieties about wanting to keep things open and flowing and so on. I would make a few points that in the period where we've had no certainty about what the next steps will be, people have been filling the vacuum with speculation and anxiety. And I would say it's a very useful moment to dial back on that dialogue and to dial up some of the other things. So let's take the common travel area to start with. The common travel area is in existence since the 1920s. You will find bucket loads of research, and if you want to find it originally, bucket loads of documents in the National Archive for Britain and Kew Gardens or in the National Archive here in Dublin. And this is the product of extensive bilateral diplomacy between Dublin and London pretty well every decade right through before the Second World War, after the Second World War, etc. So there's a big lot of stuff there. But you will not find one piece of statute law on the common travel area and the statute book of the UK or of Ireland or indeed in its own territorial integrity within Northern Ireland. The first reference that you will find in law to the common travel area is in protocols three and four and declaration number three of the Amsterdam Treaty, which entered into force on the 1st of May of 1999. And that recognized that Britain and Ireland had an opt-out from justice and home affairs from Schengen. But Ireland put in a political declaration to say but we choose to reserve the right to opt into pretty well everything that might be consistent with keeping the common travel area, which is part of the protocols three and four. And a protocol in a European treaty has the equivalent effect in law of an article in a European treaty. And so this is already in EU law. In 1999 there were 15 member states, but every state that joined since signs an accession treaty where they take on the ackee of the existing treaties and the existing secondary law. And so we're not starting with a blank sheet. We are not. I hear I take some of the commentary I've seen in media and of course I wasn't at the meeting. I'm sure the meeting went very well. But there's a lot of colorful commentary that Mrs. Merkel kind of gave a slap in the ear to the T-shirt or whatever. I mean I exaggerate but that was the kind of media color of a lot of the comment. This was based on a comment that Mrs. Merkel said which is perfectly rational that Ireland is one of 27 states and we're all going to have to sit down. I'll come to the EU later and figure out how do we respond to this. That didn't mean that Mrs. Merkel was putting Ireland down. So let me just kind of wheel that back a little bit. Sometimes you get comment here that look we're only small. We're only a few million. There's hundreds of millions. We're on a small island. We're on the periphery etc. This is true as a fact of history, demography and geography. It's incontestably true. But it was ever thus. However as a member state of the European Union we are not some hapless peripheral mendicant who has to go down on our knee to assert our rights. We have a legacy of negotiators' rights of substance over many years of competent politics and public diplomacy. And one of them is the legal reference in the Treaty on Sudan to the common travel area. Now we have the Taoiseach saying, we have the British Prime Minister saying, the Northern Ireland Secretary saying, with the First Minister saying in Belfast and the Deputy First Minister in Belfast all saying they don't want a hard border, they don't want to go back to the old days and they want to keep this open to the maximum extent. And we go with our hand up as a small state in a system based on the principle of the equality of status of states. Not the equality of the muscular weight, votes in council, size of economy, the equality of status of member states to point to the treaties and say, that's a comfort zone for us because it's part of an existing European ackee at the level of protocol definition which itself is the equivalent of treaty law. And as you will know, to change treaty law requires unanimity. And I can think of one state that might take a dim view of trying to tear up that particular ackee. So I feel like tone it down, tone it back and recognize we are players. We have played and this is there. So if no one in Britain or Ireland or Northern Ireland wants to do things to each other on the border which are nasty and if we have an ackee from Amsterdam which actually expressly mentions the common travel area and gave us the Schengen opt-out to do our Anglo-Irish thing, I think we've all the bits we need. Then you might say, which would be a fair point, but what happens if all these guys show up here that we don't want or more to the point that the British don't want or if they were in the United States that Donald Trump wouldn't want? The illegal migrants, et cetera, et cetera. You can add up the whole list yourself. The welfare spongers who want to come and live off the National Health Service or whatever in Britain. This is a very interesting question but it's not a very new question. The identical question exists today and existed last year and existed for a long time because of course anyone could have slipped in by the back door in principle, in theory at any time so it's not a new theory. So what happened on that front? We had, again for the first time beyond the standard diplomacy that had negotiated the common travel agreement, we had a joint statement between the British and the Irish in December of 2011 which actually set out a mutual understanding on muscling up our screening, our mutual cooperation, our data exchange, all of the rules that kind of close off anxieties about the back door. We already have an Anglo-Irish capacity to do it and the Irish Immigration Service and its British equivalent have high levels of contact based on that joint initiative and all I would say if someone thinks it needs to be polished up a bit or muscled up a bit, let's do it. But let's not pretend this is a brand new question and the sky will fall in because we don't know the answer. We've been dealing with this bilaterally inside the EU with the same set of anxieties like illegal movement, et cetera, criminality, whatever it could be cross-border. So I think a lot of this stuff is there and I think we can deal with that thing is my view. And we need to begin to get into a mode of saying we recognize that this big unwanted elephant in the room but realism requires us to recognize there's an elephant rather than to fill the rest of the room that isn't filled by the elephant with all sorts of idle and useless speculation. The second element I want to touch on regards this whole issue of a border pole. If you want to come back in questions we can go to it. I'm not here either recommending it or not. We can talk about that. I want to make a different set of points. If you look at the Northern Ireland Peace Agreement its formal name we know of more as the Good Friday Agreement from April of 1998 it defines the right of self-determination of the people of the island of Ireland and of the people in particular of Northern Ireland and that that right of self-determination exercised today in their Britishness could be exercised at some future date in their Irishness if a majority so chose. And what we have in effect is what I would call a quadruple lock system. The Secretary of State in Northern Ireland under the agreement has to give approval to have a border pole and the Secretary of State and his predecessor said no because the conditions don't exist. So that's one condition hasn't been met. If they had a border pole the second thing required to have the change is that people in Northern Ireland by majority have to vote that they actually want to leave the United Kingdom to join the Republic of Ireland. The third lock is that the Houses of the Oroctus have to have a debate and propose a piece of legislation to have a referendum to deal with Irish unification. And the fourth lock is the Irish people have to decide if they want to vote for that in the Republic of Ireland. I don't see any of that happening anytime soon but we can come back and all that. I observe a different point. Because it may not happen anytime soon doesn't mean it might never happen. And so one of the contingencies we need to think of is what if we, the Republic of Ireland are inside the EU and in the next few years that Northern Ireland by virtue of being in the United Kingdom is outside the EU. But that at some other stage because of frustrations even about being outside and the actual consequences of being outside that a majority said actually we'll vote to switch sides. Do they have to start at the back of a big queue? Do they need the unanimity of the existing member state to change primary law to recognise that a new state is joining? Do they need to negotiate 31 chapters? The answer to that is no because they jury article 3 of the Irish constitution through hearts and minds rather than territorial claim lays a claim to the unity of the nation of Ireland in all its diversity subject to a consensual vote of course in Northern Ireland we've left open the finality of Ireland's self-determination and here we have a perfect example German basic law 1949, article 23 the Allies produced lots of eminent professors to help the Germans who have lots of eminent professors to write the basic law with all the checks and balances we know. But Conrad Adenauer and the parliamentarians at the time said hold on a minute there's one thing you don't have in here which is we laid claim to German unification and in the end people agreed to the day jury claim of article 23 which provided for the accession of the GDR appeared in mind in 1949 when the cold war is about to be ramped up to being a freezing cold war when the Iron Curtain and where this has to look if it was a horse race as a bloody awful bet but four decades later on the 3rd of October 1990 Germany was reunified and because it was exceeding into the continuing state which was the high contracting party that had signed the treaties it wasn't a new state and therefore required no change in EU primary law and no unanimity of everyone to take in a new state it was simply a bigger old state and so what we had in 1990 or in the years the two years that followed was an enlargement of territory without a new accession and to my mind it is the perfect example of a future Irish perspective even if that might not happen for 100 years who knows what will happen in 100 years or 50 years or 20 years or maybe 5 years so I think we need to provide for that it's a de jure concept but with real de facto implications because later it could have a real meaning to us and we don't want to add other layers of uncertainty the other thing for Ireland is that we have in a kind of a way and I'm sure in this audience you represent different parts of it we have kind of the coexistence of two economies we have the foreign sector which drives massive amounts of our exports and indeed there's some extraordinary things about GDP as we saw we have all of that and all of its energies and that is radically diversified Irish threat but for Irish domestic firms food and agriculture in particular and for small and medium enterprise they have a trade dependency of about 40% 4-0 in the UK what is the state at large is only 14% 1-4 so the implications to do with jobs and trades at the SME and Irish enterprise level are seriously more difficult in some post-Brexit circumstances than in some others so if we could run Britain's negotiation we surely want them to go for the Norway EEA option which is the one that least damages the potential and then one last comment on Ireland economy and that connection somewhere of the order of 16 or 17% of Ireland's GDP is earned with engagement with UK goods and services and that exists as the transmission mechanism I don't predict this and I don't wish it but just that simple because it's too late at night if you don't complicated sums if the UK economy shrunk by 10% points we would lose 1.7% of GDP because 17% of the GDP is connected so it's a kind of a direct transmission without getting into secondary effects and multipliers and so on so we're out there with a lot of exposure we've got our border issues and then to do with the border itself as a custom zone, tariffs and so on that is pure speculation because we don't know what Britain wants because Britain doesn't know what it wants and then we don't really get and a very quick comment what about EU EU there may be all sorts of diplomatic soundings here and everywhere EU is clear on one thing at the level of the council and the commission no notification no negotiation so until Britain tables the exit card of article 50 the negotiations won't start and until the negotiations start we won't begin to define even if it's highly contested what are the parameters of the actual real negotiating agenda when will it happen as I said earlier we don't know we can come back in that if you want speculative ideas on that who will do the negotiating it seems to me that the European council at the intergovernmental level will want to keep a significant hold of the negotiating brief and already Donald Tusk appointed a Belgian diplomat to head up that function for the council however the depth of the disengagement depending on the extent of what Britain chooses to ask for is so technically complicated that it will require massive input from the European commission a second element that the commission has said the council hasn't said it significantly so this could or not change is Cecilia Muldstrom the trade commissioner went to London a few days after the referendum and she was kind of drowned out in all the noise of the post referendum, Mr Cameron the Labour Party, Scotland etc but she said an interesting thing of course it wasn't as crude as this but first divorce and get out of the bed and then if you want to put a leg back into that bed then we start the negotiating about which leg and which side of the bed in other words there's a sequence that sequence means the next deal could be a long way off I won't be surprised if that ends up as a parallelism in the two negotiations but that's not what's currently signaled at least on the European commission side other things some of you may or may not have noticed there's a big trade deal effectively now fully negotiated between the EU and Canada the comprehensive economic trade area, CETA CETA was going to be signed off it's a European competence the council gave a negotiating mandate the commission did its job the council could calibrate it here and there job done, go to the European Parliament for assent finished except I won't say because of, I don't know because of political sensitivities because of what happened with Brexit the commission having argued that this was a European confidence that needed at the end just the assent of the European Parliament relented two or three weeks ago and said no actually it needs the approval of every national parliament if it happens will set the precedent for any new trade deal that the UK does which will bring in because you've always an election somewhere you've always need your scrutiny somewhere you've always some interest group somewhere you'll have at least 27 red lines because everyone is something that they want to watch out for which have to be negotiated in order to cope with getting votes through Parliament there are lots of potentially unexploded landmines including minefields that we haven't yet thought about and I will close out with one other comment to do with something that doesn't surprise me as regards Britain having conceded for 40 odd years the negotiation of all international trade deals which included Britain as a member of EU to Brussels Britain now has no bureaucracy skilled in negotiating trade deals and I see in particular the Financial Times looking at what the costs could be of hiring external legal advisors from consulting firms and legal firms who must be just salivating at the prospect of paradise on earth and life before death and figures are being put in speculative at the moment which could cost up to 5 billion a year which by the way ignoring a recession which could kill Boris's boss on its numbers ignoring that if they did an EEA or Britzerland style deal they have to put money into the EU budget this could actually end up using any net benefit if there is any paying some other guys to operate the poop scoop to clean up the mess that Mr Cameron didn't really think about he gave the speech in Bloomberg in London e voila, thank you