 So, the idea and the format here is that I'm going to ask a set of questions to John and then John will try and answer those questions, we'll certainly answer them eloquently and then we'll open it up to the floor. So it's about half an hour maybe on the fixed questions and then open it up then to more open questions for people from the audience. So there's a couple of different themes we were going to try and get John's insight into. First was joining up the consumer in competition policy. How did the two work together? The next one then is competition policy with the new technologies and disruptive change that's happening right across the economy and many economies across the world. The next one then is politics and political economy of competition and regulation. How do we deal with the new politics not only here locally but also again globally? And the last one I thought just given where we are at the moment we had a lot of questions on Brexit and it was great, hopefully we'll get John's great insights into Brexit. I'm not sure you'll have all the answers John but at least we can get an insight into where we are at the moment. So let's start off with consumer and competition policy. So the first question really John is we've seen the experience you know of the evolution of regulation. I mean the UK was a leader here. You know over the last 20-25 years you know you've seen the split up of the industry that created a creation of secular regulators competition coming right the way through. So what does that look like today from a consumer perspective given what we've already seen happen? Thanks Art. It's very nice to be back here. Tom Arnold reminded me that I was here. I spoke here last in 2007 but when I was with the competition authority our offices were and the PC is still just here in Parnell Square so it's very nicely back on familiar turf. I mean when I was when my parents had me and moved into a new house they waited four years for a telephone instrument and it wasn't because telephone instruments required four years to make but because there was a monopoly on telephones and if you knew a local TD you can get it faster and the UK really led in in that breakdown or breaking up of the relationship between state-owned monopolies in the government and trying to get markets to deliver things that had been you know post-war and earlier seen as things that only the state could deliver and maybe it was right that only the state could deliver them then and the UK started that and it certainly had a huge influence in Europe and I think there were enormous benefits from the liberalisation having the UK and and consequently in the European Union so you you see for example how telephone charges have fallen, airfares fell, new entrants entering those markets so I think it was a really fantastic to do but my view now is that the sector regulators in the UK are inimical to the interests of consumers and the way that they operate and and I've thought this for about five years I spent six months advising David Cameron in Economic Policy and one of the papers I took to the cabinet was a proposal to abolish all the sector regulators and he stopped short of doing that but agreed with a lot of the rest of it and I'll tell you what I think the problem is though first of all the UK has given all of the regulators consumer and competition powers and they don't use them instead of going and enforcing the regular law they write the conditions into the licenses of the firm so they can control the ex ante and that has made the firm is slightly dependent on the regulators so the regular is a bit of a puppet master with the the firms on one side there's a punch of the market and it's become increasingly a puppet master on the consumer side as well we now have got to the stage in the UK where consumers who don't switch are seen as problem and their problem for the regulator and the regulator has to make them switch in energy as opposed to saying if you're getting ripped off in the market do something about it we've now got to the stage is the government's problem and I remember when I started the competition authority there was high inflation and the government put in an order on the price of the pint this was in 2001 I remember a piece of or key footage of a guy sitting in a pub in Dublin he's probably the stag's head saying a pint of Guinness is five pence cheaper across the road and what's the government doing about that and so you know but so we've no competition law enforcement they become more and more interventionist and the very existence and by the way the people running them are all good friends of mine is not about the individuals but they've become like a a lightning rod for all of the political desire to intervene in markets and because they exist as they do the politicians have to do something with them so let me contrast in 2010 2009 Gordon Brown 2010 David Cameron 2011 David Cameron all of them were very upset with rising energy prices and so they went and got lots of things done in by off-gem in the UK but petrol prices were going up and they kept putting pressure on the OFT to do studies of the petrol market and I refused on the basis there wasn't a problem we weren't going to do it and we were able to withstand but the energy regulator couldn't so you know petrol prices were going up and domestic energy prices were going up and domestic energy prices got all of the the heat because there was a regulator there to do it and I think over time what's happened is the regulators are also then required by law to do lots of consultation and so what we now have is that any I advise that companies in energy telecoms the regulators produce 100 page documents to consult on more or less on a weekly basis only industry and deciders can do them inside the companies the people whose careers do well are they would understand regulation they have no incentive to change anything BT has just appointed an independent chairman for open reach they've gone and picked somebody's an ex-member of the off-com board because they obviously consider that in order to restructure make open reach more efficient it's better to have somebody's been on the board of off-com than somebody who's actually driven change within the industry so we don't have people running these companies anymore who are really skilled in change management and driving efficiency and so there's chronic inefficiency inside them we don't have I mean I you're far better internet access in most parts of Ireland and 3g access 4g access than you have in the uk and ad so the uk haven't been an early leader with a model that really worked well has let that model live beyond its useful life and so my proposal to Cameron and still is my view and by the way it also makes entry really difficult and it makes it impossible for organizations like which the consumer association to engage in these consultations because they're so technical so my proposal then and still is that they should have one single access regulator for access to critical infrastructure that's cross sector and move the competition consumer powers back to the competition markets authority and I know I come from a competition background but that's what I would do those criticisms don't necessarily apply in Ireland Ireland's at a different stage of development so I don't mean to imply that here but there comes a point at which you say the system has outlived its useful function I think we've got there in the uk and I think that will happen but it just may not happen soon enough it might take another five or ten years before people wake up to it okay so a question that's somewhat related to this then John is really what the effect of the crash has had on regulation more generally you know you mentioned about the sort of the the the puppet master for the regulator as long as we're not punching Judy I suppose that's about but to what extent has that you know crash changed the the balance between producers and consumers and I was is there a perception that the producer is much more powerful now I post the crash and is there something we should look at as regulators in that context I mean the there's a lovely book by juliano matter former italian prime minister called anti trust and the bounds of power and he makes the point that in a liberal market democracy you give people economic freedom and they use that economic freedom to become economically powerful and then they use that economic party to get close to politicians and that causes the decline of democracy and he said that the reason why the Sherman act came about in the United States was to deal with the trust that had grown up in the late 19th century and he makes the point that the origins of the the founders of the European Union wanted a strong framework of state aid control competition rules in order to protect democracy more than just to protect consumers and I think in the financial crisis you've seen actually not just the sort of producer interest scroll but you've seen them growing away the damages democracy and you see that in the states you see it with the brexit vote in the uk and so on and and I think it has you know the independence of regulators been undermined I in seven years of the oft every single year there was a report from some official report commissioned by government and proposing a redivision of our responsibilities taking some powers away usually and giving to somebody else all of them incremental and I'm not opposed to institutional change but but not incremental stuff and so every year I had to be careful what we did what we said because somebody was going to get away jail and start bringing about an institutional change and so we don't have institutional stability and in a time of crisis that becomes more acute because it's very difficult to run in the agency independently if parliament is constantly redoing your boundaries I think consumers have got even weaker if you look at in 10 years ago which the consumer participation in the UK was very powerful because it was the only person doing price comparison and product comparison work and it could use the revenues from that to cross subsidize its advocacy work and it had specialists in financial services energy telecoms now we have price comparison websites rich doesn't have that money anymore and actually there's almost no consumer advocacy in the UK so so that's quite difficult so yeah I think we're in quite a bad space with that and I think the the the politics of the moment do not favor independent institutions and you see that in the UK with the attacks on the bank of England over the summer the attacks on the office of budget responsibility and so on so it's it's a you know it's there is a risk of what a matter said is coming to pass and that's also true I mean I I don't want to get into too much the apple tax case I'm giving a speech about in next week but the way in which Vastaya handled that case where she treated the Irish government the way she's stopped using state aid control to deal with steel in Germany railways and a whole lot of other industries that are close to the German and French government and she targets this particular type of taxation it's just deeply political and so I fear that the Commission is sort of foregoing its competencies in the areas where it matters most for democracy and actually doing things that are very populist as well so I think we're seeing that at a European level and I say that as somebody's very pro-European it distresses me that the European Commission is not behaving better um but so I think we're seeing independent institutions that should be independent um being um uh threatened by politics and that feeds into the next question then about the sort of the role is part of the solution certainly in competition you've got a single strong entity for imposing and enforcing competition law would if we had something similar on a consumer end in some sort of pan-European if we look at VW and some of the scandals there or whatever is that would that be better than what we have at the moment? Absolutely the um the the company the consumer responsibility in Europe got split between three different commissioners and the Yonker Commission and I actually wrote a paper about this at the time saying it was a you know they should be together and it's I don't want I wouldn't want enormous amounts of centralisation I think the decentralisation and competition law is a very good thing and the decentralised consumer law is a very good thing but the current situation in Europe is a really fragmented consumer policy at the centre of Europe and that's not good for the citizen because it means that they interfere on things like roaming where they have the instruments to do so but they fail to deal with things like Volkswagen so I completely agree with that and I also think having DG comp jump more joined up with the consumer side would be better it's something I've long told you know. The other question then that's sort of the last question then on this consumer competition piece is when we talk to industry we turn around and they say well we're champions of the consumer and industry comes back and says oh actually your job was to pull competition how do the two work together and is there a tension between the two or how can we ensure that they complement each other? I don't think regulators should be advocates for the consumer but I think they should be I think it's better if regulation is there to promote the interests of consumers I mean if you promote the interests of producers you're on a slippery slope to nowhere and you know I've always thought that a competition authority that has consumer powers there's a number of benefits from having them together and one is that problems in markets are not always you look at a problem in a market it's not over solved by just one instrument so probably the best example of this was drip pricing in airlines so people remember back in the middle of the last decade airlines right now in particular were charging you know ridiculously low amounts close to zero for airfares but then adding lots of extras so you paid 70 pounds but you can get them until later in the booking and that was intense competition an intense competition without you know fair grounds of engagement fees to be the consumer can actually bad for the consumer so what we did was we intervened with our consumer powers and said you if something's essential to the fair it has to be in the upfront price and as a result we stopped a lot of that drip pricing now Ryanair ran around that another round ran around it with credit card fees and seating charges and even speculated about toilet charges but we then did an evaluation and our evaluation showed the consumer saved 120 million a year from the increased competition that resulted from that because people could compare prices more easily but if we'd just been a competition authority we couldn't have done anything about that and I think it would have been really difficult for a consumer only authority to have had the intellectual and analytical apparatus to have understood the competition dynamic was that important because those evaluation numbers surprised me we often evaluation numbers that surprised me negatively but those were surprisingly good evaluation numbers and it was actually an example of a consumer intervention increasing competition another example of that was the government liberalized directory inquiries in the UK back in 2002 as a result the prices went up by about tenfold even the incumbent managed to increase their prices it was a really bad liberal liberalization and the the problem was as with other liberalizations people hadn't thought about about the consumer side enough we did as well with mobility aids the government of the UK decided rather than buy wheelchairs for people where they got a bulk this time to give them the money and let them buy their own people buying wheelchairs are very prone to doorstep selling and doorstep selling is a notorious form of ripping off of vulnerable consumers and so we found that they were paying on average 50 percent more than the government was paying for the mobility aids and so your well intention moves to empower consumers and so on that don't think about but not just the competition aspects but the consumer aspects together so I'm a big fan of them being done together because I think you get better answers and I know that you know that's happened here if the way it is in the UK to a large extent and I think in Canada Australia and the United States competition consumer powers are joined up and I think the agencies there are stronger for that one of the things you touched on in responding to that was you know the technology in that sense that we're seeing disruption coming through from technology we've got our group of regulatory network we're sharing we're seeing more and more cross cutting areas across the various areas that we regulate take for example a consumer trying to use some sort of financial transaction on their mobile phone so you've got a transaction that's financial you've got the mobile phone which is in the calm sector you've got competition issues you've got sort of data privacy issues if they can't charge the phone it becomes an energy market issue and they're the consumers just doing one simple thing they're just doing a transaction on their phone so how can we try and adapt for this rapidly changing environment what's your suggestions I mean I think so I'll talk about Uber Uber's a client of mine and so I and I as people may know I've a long standing interest in taxi markets so it's the I would I would advise them for free because I saw like taxes don't don't tell them that but so what's really interesting about and Halo here is a bit the same so it does a number of things so first of all Uber gives you levels of quality one of the things that I mean I think taxi regulation here went really sharply downhill after I left the country not because no causality but just couldn't send it but you know I don't see why I mean I get Uber cars all the time in London I don't need things painted on the door there are a cost increase some people might like that some people might not but why do you have a regulator imposing a quality standard it excludes poor people so and so one of the things you get with those with Uber is you get a variety of quality from Uber pool right up to Uber Lux and the consumer can choose the quality they want secondly because you have a rating system because the rider rates the the the driver and the driver rates the passenger everybody behaves incredibly well and and they value their their ratings and you can get it excluded if you don't behave well thirdly it's for regulators it poses a big opportunity but also a huge challenge so let's just take the issue of wheelchair accessibility for for taxis the way we currently do wheelchair accessibility is in a really clumsy way around vehicle standards so in London it's 100% mobility but even there the cost of loading and unloading your car when somebody's in a wheelchair as opposed to able-bodied is is higher and so people in wheelchairs still find it difficult especially at peak times to get taxis but with an uber style technology and sorry Dublin does it Ireland does it differently we have minimum numbers of taxis that are accessible and we reduce the license charges for them but we still don't change the marginal incentive for a driver to pick up somebody who uses a wheelchair or has another disability that requires some extra assistance but with a technology like uber you can say to uber we want you to report back to us on the average wait times of people who are booking who call themselves differently abled or whatever and the average wait times of able-bodied passengers and we want you to report the difference and we want you to get that difference you know constant but the people who currently regulate vehicle standards the individuals inside the regulator are not the people who are going to be doing big data regulation and so that's a big challenge so there's a huge opportunity there to get much much better outcomes for the consumer to basically use these quasi-market mechanisms that exist on these platforms to deliver much better outcomes but it requires a totally different skill set within the regulator and so taxi regulators all over the world are struggling with this because they're mostly at a city level they're mostly very small and they totally lack the resource and capability to switch their regulatory focus and there's some risk in switching your regulatory focus like that so I think that's one example where there's a problem for regulators another example to look at is what the financial conduct authority has done in the UK with its regulatory sandbox and this was an idea I had when I was advising David Cameron that we took to the the financial conduct authority so the financial conduct authority has created a sandbox and a unit for dealing with very financial technology startups and what they're doing is they have a unit where anybody who's running a fintech business can go to them and talk to them they help them through the licensing process they allow them to operate in a safe space so they don't have to get fully regulated and fully licensed where they're under a different type of control because they recognize that they won't fit into one regulation model so if you take peer-to-peer lenders as an example a peer-to-peer lender takes money from me and then lends it to you so it is both a lender and a borrower and it then has to get a license to credit license and a license more or less as a bank and so what they've done is they've created a new type of quasi-license for peer-to-peer lenders but they they just keep them under slightly tighter leash in other ways and and it's a really good model for what what regulators can do so I think there's lots of opportunities there but it requires quite a lot of creative thinking by regulators and it's a challenge for smaller regulators compared to larger ones because you know larger regulators have the resources and bandwidth to do this the final point I'd say is that there's the other side of the coin is the disruptive entrance like uber and airbnb could behave a lot better and your airbnb has now yesterday woken up to the fact that it is able to regulate 90 days a year so we helped we um worked for a company called one finds day and we helped them um supported them in getting persuaded in the government to bring in legislation allowing 90 day lets for short term lets you can let your house up to 90 days a year but airbnb said well we can't monitor that and the government has basically then said well you might lose your license to operate in the country so yeah yesterday they said they could do it they shouldn't have to be dragged kicking and screaming to this and it's actually one of the challenges you can have in regulating disruptive entrance is that you get a race to the bottom and then finally there's a huge issue for labour market regulation because you're getting this economy um started with um ebay and in airbnb and then it's more acute with uh taxi drivers where you have people earning small amounts of money doing an array of small things and sometimes some big things but they're totally outside of labour market regulation so you're seeing in the uk hmrc revenue falling um you're seeing concerns about social dumping and people not being protected on pensions maternity cover everything else and i don't think they regulated company they sorry the disruptive companies have been as good as they could be at coming up with with um appropriate solutions that all that and they're getting better at it so we want to try to sort of explore then a bit politics and sort of how politics impacts on regulation one of the things we're seeing and i think it's sort of true right across europe is this loss of faith in institutions and european institutions to some extent we we're challenged locally and in various member states as well is the solution to that that we would try and have more independence so it's some of these sort of like to take dg comp should it be an independent agency there's a parallel question here around data and facts and evidence and we try and provide as much information to show decisions but there's a loss of faith and experts there's a loss of faith and expertise generally you know we've seen this in the uk where people said brexit and the concept brexit oh look that's just the view of experts in it in a sort of a dismissive way how do we try and adapt to this changing political environment is is it changing the institutions to the solution well i mean first on on independence i'm a big fan of independent regulators and i i think looking at dg comp now going back to my earlier comment i would be absolutely in favor of dg comp being politically independent because i don't think it's ever been fully politically independent but it's gotten worse under the last two commissioners and so favor that but i think independent bodies require very careful thought about how you manage them and at the beginning of independence things work very well but as it goes on over time it can get more challenging because you know politicians change the people who put in place the independent organizations will value them but then the next generation of politicians may not so i think it's very important to have really clear lines of engagement with government departments it's very important that the right issues go to the right place so if there's distribution on question so the very simple example in regulation is things like universal coverage um you know anything about redistribution of some you're taking money from one person giving to another that is best to be something that's decided by the government and ideally implemented at a government level and then the regulator might very well advise on that but it should all be quite open and transparent i i think it's quite useful to have a formal communication system between regulators and government so that the government writes and sets out strategic strategic steer for the next three or five years or whatever we knew governments earlier but these are the things we care about but the regulator in terms of enforcing the law is fully independent and similarly when the government is designing a system to do some redistribution that the regulator is able to inform us with who's going to be affected and how much and give them the data and i was always struck at the oft that we would do things that would benefit you know we'd enforce the law in one area and it would benefit one group of consumers and not the other we were very bad at explaining to the government who was losing out and if you look in the uk at the moment we have this concern with inert consumers in financial services telecoms you know people with landlines and telecoms are current issue energy etc etc but the regulators in the uk and i've said this to them privately over the last few months they don't know if it's the same consumers across all of those markets are the people are inert in energy inert in telecoms and inert in um in credit markets because if they are you have a slightly different problem um but if they're the people who are with the monopoly the legacy monopoly supplier in each case then it's a sector specific sector by sector issue and not only the regulators in the uk have got together to answer that question and that's a really important question you know for policymaking so i think there's a lot to be done um by regulators grouping together by having a lot more clarity between regulators and government around those issues but actually having widespread um acceptance of the principle that independent regulators are good because politicians when they do get involved in markets really um you know it's protect me before i kill again you know um type of arrangement in a lot of these markets and politicians sort of know that um and i think they're quite happy in principle to give up power but they want to know that they still have some levers and they want to know they want to understand what they're getting for it and they don't think they often get enough for it so we've touched on politics then in the context of how people feel about the institutions and obviously independence helps in that but let's let's talk specifically about the political changes coming up from regsit i think we feel i feel it quite strongly here in ireland i think the concern we would have and each of us as regulators deal very closely with our european counterparts and to be honest we quite rely heavily on our uk counterparts as part of that process there's a natural alignment in many times in the way we look at things you've got some sort of shared history that helps the way we view stuff and what does that look like once we lose the uk as a strong voice i mean do we it does the does the the way that the that the eu develops become different once we've lost the uk at the table as part of the formulation of of regulatory strategy a more general policy level um i mean you're living in the uk for 11 years it's quite interesting comparing the mood in ireland every time i come back you know a little bit of distance and things and now that i advise businesses i see a lot of business people and when i come back to ireland now as opposed to say even three years ago the sense of the sense of optimism amongst people in business in this country is quite tangible i mean the business community in this country feels really agile dynamic positive and optimistic probably less so people in government and less so the further you go out of Dublin and cork but and some other cities with universities but um in the uk that's just not the case so at a high level i've quite a lot of and the second thing is i'd say in my experience the uk government is much more agile in policy making than the uk so i'm quite optimistic at one level about how ireland is going to be affected by this but there's absolutely no doubt that a lot of the things ireland has traded on within the european union and benefit from the european union are things that britain has supported and britain um has been very powerful at the table so we the financial crisis has meant i mean the european union was run with um german money french intellectual influence and sort of british mediation for the best part of 40 years um or 30 years until the financial crisis and post financial crisis german money and german intellectual influence the britain spritz have stepped back and the french have lost their position as as having intellectual leadership so and that's that's very damaging to the european union but it means that britain's influence there is damaging so in the area of regulation um i would be quite fearful that you're going to see much more political interference you know the is very initially a very small issue but um you know the bundeskartel in germany which is a politically independent institution with constitutional protection has become unbelievably political in the last two or three years because and the two very good examples of that are the facebook privacy case is taking his and his facebook on abusive dominance around privacy breaking the privacy law and even the out the former head of the french competition authority said at a public event i was that recently that it was not a case he would have brought in france and that was quite a sharp criticism because people don't normally see that in public um and of course madame vestair has encouraged them and told them that's a fuel on the fire and similarly on there's a hotel online booking case and every other country in europe the ducted hotel online booking came up with one answer and the germans came up with a very different answer and both of those i think were very political so you're seeing um a lot of politics coming into regulation and i think the uk has been very good on promoting independent regulation and promoting um regulation based on consumer welfare and productivity growth and and that's going to go and you're going to also see um for example on things like corporate taxation a lack of support from the uk on things like that so i think on policy making and ireland has very few levers in brexit um ireland will struggle to get its core requirements from brexit i.e northern ireland in the border um but its leverage beyond that to influence the larger member states in europe is going to be very very low i suspect because it's going to use all its you know considerable capital i suspect politically in europe but it's going to it's going to need all of it for some really really core things to do with ireland and so it's going to be difficult to win a lot of these other policy issues across europe and john you clearly identified this challenge for us is there things that we can do as regulators as policy makers to try and adapt to this new situation it may not be you can surely there's a short term issues but even in the medium term how should we best try and get as much influence as we can albeit it'll be a challenge i think um there are two things one is um ireland ireland just needs to make sure that his own policy house is in order um you know the before brexit in the uk all the big problems confronting the british economy had nothing to do with the european union there was this myth put about among many myths that britain was holding or sorry the european union was holding britain back from being great um but the european union wasn't stopping britain building a runway it wasn't stopping britain from improving its education system it wasn't stopping britain from building infrastructure um from relaxing the planning laws that would enable housing to be built and the myriad other microeconomic reforms that britain needs to do and should be doing but won't tackle because of vested interests so um and in ireland we have similar problems and so the the the first thing should be ireland should be focusing on education and skills one of the lessons from brexit and from trump is that you if you don't equip your domestic population to to be competitive globally you're on a hiding to nothing and britain has a large rump of people who are abandoned in a globalized world as does america ireland probably has fewer but if we don't get that right and everything from preschool education right through to university and lifelong learning and re-skilling people when they when industries closed down and restructure and we're very lucky in ireland that we didn't have an industrial revolution and we bypassed we went from agriculture to services in a way that few countries have done and therefore we were we're getting that infrastructure housing research and development um a strong competition policy small economy really needs strong competition because vested interests are always stronger in a small um economy and so just getting ireland's own policy environment in order so that ireland has talented individuals on the global stage and a really rich environment in which to do business um that's going to be incredibly important and that is going to be an insurance policy of ireland because you're not ireland can't is not never going to be big enough to determine the terms of trade of what happens globally or the global markets in which we operate we never have been we've always been a price taker and we're we're going to be a regulation taker and a standards taker in almost every instance so we we need to adapt and be agile in the face of that but having said that I think what the regulators then should be doing is I think first of all continuing to operate as though britain staying in the european union is to communicate really to communicate with business very and consumers in this country about what the costs are and building support and building the arguments for a soft rather than a hard brexit say and just being good communicators around a lot of these issues so that ireland so that ireland's influence on this issue is not confined to the department of foreign affairs and the t-shirts department but actually to the ireish diaspora in britain and europe to the ireish people working in the european commission to ireish business trading across europe and just having a sort of a consistent well-informed narrative for ireland and then ireland ireland has a lot of a lot of wider i suppose soft power that it can use and so if it can use that well it could be good but its hard power is limited so and i've been asking a lot of the questions here so i want to sort of open it up to the floor to allow other people to ask some questions but this question i suppose is really around a fear we have if you look at this effectively what we're saying is one member is leaving the club of 28 and it's going down to 27 if this doesn't at a simple level be a painful exercise for the person who's leaving does that encourage other people to say well we leave too our worry looking at that here in ireland is that somehow we end up being collateral damage and we get more affected by that than the other the rest of the 27 what's your own view on that and is there any strategy we should adopt in that context i mean ireland ireland is going to be the country most affected by brexit the even ireland companies that don't export to the uk most of their exports to the continent europe go through the uk this is easier to run logistics across the uk than take everything on ferries directly to the continent and if Britain's outside a customs union that's just going to provoke havoc even just for ireland's trade with the other 26 so so ireland's ireland is certainly going to be be be adversely affected and it's in ireland's interest i think to have the uk in a single market and to be making that case but i'm not sure there's much more than what i've said earlier that ireland can can do about