 It's difficult to avoid the use of the word chaos surrounding the United Kingdom's current handling of the Brexit negotiations. And it's worth saying just a few words about what I mean by confusion. There is, of course, and there always is, in political life. There are personal ambitions and career interests at work as they would be normally, and there's nothing very unusual or surprising about that. There is, however, also on top of that what can only be described as a deep ideological divide, which splits this government and this ruling Conservative Party, which it's about more than Brexit, but Brexit has brought together many of the themes that underline those deep, deep divisions. I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to say that it might work out that the divisions in the Conservative Party are as massive and as radical as happened during the Corn Laws in the 19th century. That is to say the grounds for some major split or major realignment. I don't say that will happen, but there are certainly enough grounds for thinking it could happen. The confusion, of course, is over how to square the circle of negotiating exit from the European Union without adversely affecting Britain's economic, commercial, political security and other interests. Many people, and I'm one of them, believe it isn't possible. But that doesn't matter. There are people who think it might be possible or should be possible and that's what they're motivated at present to try and produce in terms of a coherent government position. So far they've failed to produce it. Yesterday in the House of Commons, I was reading since I've been here in Dublin, the debate was a classic of this kind which is the Prime Minister, a much weakened figure I don't need to rehearse the reasons for her personal weakness. It's been touch and go these last few weeks whether she would survive the month and I think there's a question mark over her tenure in office, irrespective of the way things go even between now and the end of the year, but that we'll see. She said in the speech yesterday the media picked up one of two themes. First theme, we want an agreement but if we can't get an agreement we're going to be ready for a hard Brexit. I mean she didn't quite put it in that language but that was the we must begin and we are beginning arrangements that will protect our interests in the unfortunate event that we cannot reach an agreement. Now that's been implicit for some time but it's stated explicitly. So you could see a lot of heads nodding apparently in the House of Commons when that was said. But on the other hand in an almost throw away a remark talking about what would happen in the transitional phase that they are hoping to negotiate post leaving in March 2019 which would ease the transition for a period of years. I'll come back to what a period of years might mean in which more or less they say everything will remain the same. Rightly you won't notice very much difference but we will be preparing in a smooth way our eventual exit. In relation to that she asked about well during this transition period will we be independent of the European Court of Justice or not. She said oh no words the fact we will remain bound by the rulings of the European Court of Justice. She went on to say at least as far as the existing corpus of law is concerned she left open whether further laws made in parallel with our membership during the transitional phase would also be obliged, Britain would be obliged to accept. But you can see a goodies thrown one way and something thrown the other way and this has characterised the government's position all along. And I remember the last time I was lucky enough to be here talking about how this is affecting the government machine as opposed to the political class and the government machine is now right in the firing line of these internal differences. It's unavoidable. They've been brought to the head most recently by the prime ministers you may think belated decision to get a better grip on the core issues of Brexit which have to do with Britain's future trade relationship with the European Union. There are many other issues but from the government's point of view that is perhaps the overriding key one. To get a better grip on that she has sequestered very senior civil servants from the department for managing Brexit to bring them into number 10 and of course they are trying to recruit from other ministries to give a kind of mini white hall to the prime minister. This is by the way happened before but it's on a bigger scale now because frankly how do you keep control of negotiations when your minister you know has an agenda which maybe you can go along with some of the way but you can't be sure of going along with all of the way. So there is quite a lot of rivenness, conflict, division in the government machine which is adding to the problem that Brussels has which is that they don't know what the British answers to the problem are and they're not even sure what the British questions are i.e. what exactly they're after not what they will get but what exactly they're after. This I think everybody knows is particularly acute in the trade related sectors where after 40 years of membership trade expertise largely disappeared from white hall. It went to many of the most senior trade officials in Brussels are British and many others have retired and somebody said to me long time ago now they said we're in the situation where if the minister calls for a brief we've got to have a brief on the widget industry I'll call it. There was nobody that knew anything about the widget industry, had any connection, knew anybody in it. This has led to this massive enormous recruitment from consultancies, banks, putting together by the way at much higher remuneration rates than civil servants teams to try and advise them on how to handle particular sector. That's very difficult to do if you've got a lengthy timely negotiation where you can bed down the whole process. You have time to do so before you reach the crunch point in the negotiations and time is running out. One thing the UK does not have is time. Almost certainly the October decision will be that not enough progress has been made on the first stage of the negotiations to warrant the commission byrngier recommending to the council that enough progress has been made to warrant going on to the second stage which are the big chunky issues of what kind of future relationship and what transition might apply. Why? Because in the three issues not satisfactory answers have emerged on firstly payments due, secondly on citizens rights and thirdly on the border. The first two are absolutely tangibly immature in terms of agreement status. The British have conceded that they owe some money and they've even put some kind of a round figure on it but it's very much related to what they would be paying almost in the transition anyway. What they haven't yet conceded is all the long term commitments that over the years the UK has made along with all the other member states in committing long term development funding both through the common EU policy framework but also through the European Investment Bank and EU funding for development projects done by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. All of those add up to a much more substantial figure. We appear to be nowhere near an agreement on this yet. The UK kind of now recognises what they call a moral obligation, not really an eagle obligation, a moral obligation to honour these debts but does not want to debate about figures because figures will toxify an already super toxic debate and dissension and strife inside the ruling Conservative party. So what do they might settle for? They might settle for a formula which would give certain principles which somebody, most people, numerate could work out eventually how it would convert over a period of time into figures. So it's possible, it hasn't happened yet, so there's no basis as far as I can see for the commission to say we can move straight on to the second stage negotiation. That's got to be done before December, December the end of 2017. The second thing is on citizens rights. More progress has been made there. There's a fair amount of areas where there's a consensus but there are some very tricky issues again relating to the court relating to unification of families and some other issues to do with retirement people who move from one EU country to another who might fall into this category of EU residents in the UK and also UK residents in the European Union. On Ireland, I'm afraid I've got nothing to say. I have no idea what they think, what they want, what they're going to get. Not a clue. They do have one argument, however, don't underestimate the influence it can have. They can say we accept the exceptional situation of Northern Ireland. We accept fully the commitment to the Good Friday Agreement. We accept fully the whole prior commitment to the peace process. But giving an answer, I can't even ask, I can't even tell you what we would like as a substitute to border controls until I know what you will offer us in terms of the nature of the future trade agreement and agreement vis-à-vis access to the single market and participation if not membership of the customs union. So there it's a kind of dance around the spectre of the north and the border and all of that. But they are saying there, well, it's up to you. If you move to the second stage, we will be clearer about what we could do. So that's where we're at, it seems to me, and we're now looking at December. December, in theory, gives 15 months before Britain leaves in March 2019, assuming that December there is enough agreement to move to the second stage. But that's not 15 months, although it might look like 15 months, because six months has to be reserved for the approval of any treaty. So, in reality, if the second stage negotiations begin, say, in January, assuming there is this agreement in December, which is quite a big assumption, but let's assume there is, then there is about seven months, eight months, if you stretch it, to negotiate everything about the second stage, which are much bigger and far more complicated issues to do with access to relationship with the single market, the currency union, and a myriad of issues to do with health and safety, matters that relate to the free movement of trade in many sectors. So, can it be done, assuming we get to that stage? I find personally, my personal opinion is, I find great difficulty in imagining that that is going to be possible. I think had there been a quick and rapid agreement to the first stage and there was something like a year and a half, you would be a bit more sanguine about being able to complete the second stage without any delays. But I think there may have to be some delays. I've always thought that, at some point, the British government itself might ask for some extension of the article 50 timetable to provide a more realistic framework for completing the second stage of departure. But that is terribly complicated. It would have to be approved by all 28, plus Parliament, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. One rumour I hear is an old, people here from Brussels in the old days will have heard the famous phrase, stop the clock. There might be a stop the clock temptation, a bit like that. It's happened before in sectoral, complicated council negotiations, phishing, I remember, agriculture, probably some others if I put my mind to it, where they have stopped the clock and they've pretended that time doesn't move and sometimes it's only a matter of days, sometimes it's a matter of weeks and it's been many months in some cases. Not to be ruled out, is it going to happen? I haven't a clue. But those are the possibilities. Assuming that the impossible can be done in this time or the very, very difficult can be done, then all the attention then focuses to the transitional phase. Firstly, how long? The formal government position is, was two years. Note, it's changed in the last few weeks to about two years. So what is about two years? I'm inclined to say again, search me, but it's more than two years. The Chancellor, Philip Hammond, who is held by his party to represent the spearhead of the soft Brexit approach, has talked about two or three years. Other people have talked and speculated about a longer transition. Maybe even a transition that is sectorally specific, i.e. different time periods for different sectors. I see John Bruton speculated in the papers about six years and I've heard similar figures talked about, but there is no indication as to what the government's real fallback. This is ultra secret. This is as secret as the wartime spy centre, the intelligence centre when the Churchill got all the advance to intelligence of the Burmacht in its military deployment and that he couldn't do too much because it would reveal that they had the secret. There is something comparable now about the nature of the transition. So, coming on then to the questions about what kind of a deal might, we want to imagine if it got to that stage, the more access to the kind of rights that members have that a non-member might be given, that principle, is obviously related to acceptance of the conditionalities and the disciplines and the obligations that apply to members. So, it's a two-way bargain. It goes roughly like this. If we were to concede that you would have significant access, comparable, the government's position is identical as far as possible in terms of the benefits that we have from the single market, from the customs union, etc. The more that is the case, the greater have to be the matching obligations that go with that kind of quasi membership status. That free movement obviously has been foremost among them. That has been an absolutely toxic issue in the whole British debate. It undoubtedly was deliberately used to poison the debate by the Brexit side and all kinds of, you know about the phony promises of hundreds of millions of pounds a week going to the NHS once we stop our budget payments and all that kind of talk. But it's become now a much more problematic question in a way that the government might not have anticipated. There is a problem now with EU workers in Britain, that is that they're leaving, and they're leaving in very significant numbers, and understandably. And that is why there is a serious personnel crisis, shortage of people emerging in the health service, emerging in agriculture, by the way, especially in the east coast where Brexit has been quite strong, and in other areas of science, universities, research. So the problem isn't immigration, but immigration. It is not immigration, but immigration, if you will, or people leaving. If I had to speculate, and I'm saying all of this with a heavy health warning, might there be some way to ease this. Firstly, they're now talking about high levels of continued migration. They're not pretending tens of thousands down to tens of thousands, that's all gone, that's for the birds, all disappeared. Now they're talking, and when they talk to particular sectors, the car industry, agriculture, the health service, they say, oh there won't be any change, you'll have as many people as you want. The rules and regulations, so there's a kind of retreat from the tangibility of ending free movement. There's a retreat from it already very much underway. And the skeptic, hardline skeptics, the most ideological skeptics on the far right are picking this up in a big way. So they are beginning to dilute what they're meant by ending free movement or managing migration. There are some other things that are also happening which could affect this discussion. One of the problem areas, it's not a very important one, but it has been a problem area, has been the abuse of the posted workers directive, under which companies in, say, Central and Eastern Europe can send people to work in the UK, and in effect have disregarded agreed labour standards, pay rates, workers' rights, et cetera. There is now a proposal, not from the British, a proposal from the Commission, the President has, the Commission has talked openly about it, of a major reform, and it's driven by the Swedes, Danes, Germans, in particular the French, to amend the posted workers directive so that that becomes much, much more difficult and can be cracked down on. That could be another element. I'm just citing bits of the trifle that might go into the pudding, as it were. And thirdly, there is now, I think, as part of a new current of discussion in the European Union about reform of the European Union. This has come up in a number of contexts. One of great importance to all member states and finance ministers, but it's a bit of a double-edged sword for Ireland, is the crackdown on major corporate tax avoidance. The, I think, fairy tale system under which giant global corporations have their tax assessed on what's called turnover, on profits rather than on turnover, which allows quite ludicrously small sums to be paid. That's happening with the new Vestager proposals. There is also the new proposal for a euro area social pillar, a strengthening of the existing social pillar applicable to the euro area countries, open to the non-uro area EU countries if they wish to join it. So what I'm describing here are various elements that could emerge in the eventual pudding that emerges to be decided on in talks during the second stage. Has that solved the free movement problem? No. Is it still the bogey that is most difficult to confront and tackle? Yes. Is it losing some of its electoral potency? Yes. The evidence from the recent general election and from other polling evidence is that the support for hardline Brexitary is diminishing. It's declining. It mustn't exaggerate it. And people who are defected from the Labour Party, for example, because of leave sympathies, that vote is refluxing back. And by the way, quite a big way. So it doesn't mean they suddenly become terribly europhilic. It means that they are much more worried about other things. There are many other challenges, issues that face them, face people economically, social inequality question. All of those issues which are at the heart of the British debate are overarching some of these earlier divisions and debates on the Brexit. So one important thing I want to say about the nature of the transition agreement is this. There is now a new constitutional setup for the electoral law in Britain, a five-year term parliament. The five-year term of this government ends in spring of 2022. So that's the furthest that the government could go. This is not to say they'll get anything like that given what's going on, but it is the constitutional limit. The more, if there is any delay to the start of the transitional phase as a result of the need for more time to negotiate the second phase of these negotiations, or if the transition phase is extended in the way it looks as though it may well be, then it passes 2022, and that's a big political point. That means the actual moment of truth occurs after this government has left office and when this government may well not be re-elected and there may be a new government. Now I don't want to invent reasons for thinking the world changes overnight, but the political context in which the debates are taking place, it seems to me will change. Let me say a word about the Labour opposition because it's caused a lot of questions to be raised. I can't say a huge amount, but I'd say this from having talked to people in the Corbyn leadership and in particular Keir Starmer, who is the Shadow Minister for Negotiations. At one level, they would agree, I think, with a large part of the analysis I've given. But another part of them says, well, we've got to think about the electoral arithmetic. There are still a lot of older Labour MPs that are worried about the leave vote in their constituencies, which inhibits how far we can move publicly to a breach with the government's negotiating objectives. So the present formal stance is to creep ahead by a few centimetres of the government's position. They argued for when it wasn't clear they would have any kind of transitional phase that kept the present arrangements in place, they said they should be there. Then the government accepted, well, maybe they should be there, and then they said, well, we're not going to put a time limit on this, it depends on circumstances. Jeremy Corbyn has said, himself, he's pointed out, I put no time limit on how long these transitional measures last. Now, you may say, and I certainly have said, it's not the bravest of positions, but it seems to me it reflects what is actually happening on the ground, that as the centre of British attention focuses to a range of other issues, as well as Brexit, and the government positions weakens, it can be in a stronger position to remain ahead of where the government is without being so far ahead that they risk turning tails on them and inciting divisions in their own ranks about how far they should go to recognise the inevitability of a protracted relationship with the European Union. The last thing I want to say really at this, I'm obviously happy to field any questions that you've got, is something I don't think enough attention has been given to, which is that I've referred to some of the changes that are occurring at the European Union level, or not changes that are occurring, changes that are being talked about, let's be clear. Important changes which move in the direction of the Euro area becoming the core of the process of European integration. It's not a new idea, it's coming back again in quite a significant way, and it's interesting that the Euro area is appearing as the body which would undertake some new steps in integration, quite apart from the ones that relate to Economic and Monetary Union, which is naturally their business anyway, like the European Labour Authority that is now being talked about, like various other measures that are designed to strengthen the social, environmental governance of the European Union. None of this has yet materialised in a final agreement, but I think a speech made by Macron a few weeks ago, I think it was in Merseil, in which he talked about this, he said, what we're really talking about is looking again at a Europe of concentric circles, and he talked about, at one point, he actually said, I haven't got the precise words in front of me, but he said, you know there could be the Euro area, there could be the immediate circle around it, of EU countries that are not yet in the Euro area, there might be a third circle of countries that could be brought much closer to the European Union, the way he put it. I think what he has in mind might be a resting place for countries in the Balkans, maybe in the neighbourhood, the so-called neighbourhood agreement countries, or some of them, I don't know that anybody would put it through in detail, where there might be a more structured, institutionalised relationship, and he said, who knows, maybe that will be a place where our British friends would be most comfortable, and maybe that will be something that emerges. So I think that the Brexit issue becomes, the longer we go on, intimately linked with the process, internal process in the European Union itself and the future revolution, all of these things add more unknowns to the equation. I'm aware I'm not ending with a conclusion that says, therefore, one, two, three, four, but perhaps a wider range of options than has hitherto been considered. I think that British public opinion is at a turning point, I think it's shown that in the recent elections, which have been about other issues, this is important, I think there is less gung-ho zealotry for Brexit than there was, but the poison, if you like, has gone very deep into the present government, and it's difficult to know how long it can survive as a coherent government, whether a premature election or an earlier than foreseen election might occur, but one will certainly have to occur probably before the transitional period itself is over, which raises all other kinds of speculation.