United Ireland Poll - please vote

The only time you ever hear 'affordability' coming into power-swap speak is when they don't actually want to do something.

If they want it, of course it's affordable and they will all 'want' a UI. Can you imagine a major Irish political pary in the south being anti a UI?????

Their position of a UI did happen would be untenable.

It simply isn't going to happen even if the John Bruton, Neale Richmond's would wish otherwise.

Good man, your made up figures are actually worse than the papers being discussed!

Doyle has it at only 2.5bn and that requires a 5% tax increase.

Blaaz, the figures all come from peer reviewed research not from me.

My real name isn't Doyle or Fitzgerald and I'm definitely not German so not Hubner either.

A bit of controversy earlier over who funded the Hubner. I said it was the "Friends of Sinn Fein" as that's what I read in the Indo or Times.

According to this article it was the "Knights of the Red Branch Inc" who have links to Sinn Fein.

https://sluggerotoole.com/tag/knights-of-the-red-branch/

Sorry, deflect from what?

The Hubner report is the only one on the benefits as far as I know so won't be possible for me to talk about a more recent one.

And of course SF are relevant here given who commissioned it and the level of promotion of the paper by SF.

Have you any comments on the actual substance of the article?

Is it fair to say the paper is based on Tory style economic policy?

In my opinion I think its lack of traction at the time was due to the results.

I wouldn't say it's redundant as such more of a best case or 2nd best scenario where the Irish Economy isn't influenced by outside forces. I'm saying second best because it assumes a static world economy so best would be a growing worldwide economy.

COVID and the rest i would assume will have a negative effect on the costs and benefits. Personally can't see them having a positive effect.

For God sake Francie, you used COVID as a reason to say the Hubner paper was redundant. Given his paper looks only at the financial side of unification, the context was clearly economic.

Francie, we were talking about the Hubner paper. It only focuses on the financial side. That is the context here. I think it would have a negative effect on the economic predictions. I shouldn't need to clarify that. The context was crystal clear.

That last sentence is very odd. Hubner is an economist hired to write a paper on the economic benefits of a UI.

If he updated the paper to include COVID he would still be looking at purely from a financial perspective.

Look at the Arins Project. A ton of academic s working on it. They each stick to their own area of expertise.

Just to avoid confusion. If a discussion comes from one of the lads paper my replies will be in that context unless you clarify otherwise.

I said i thought COVID would have a negative effect on the cost. Whole island security is an advantage but obviously i think the net effect would be negative. All the expenses we had for this one but with 8 instead of 6 million. PUP etc.

If you think that it would have a positive effect then give your reasons. I just don't see the negative effect of partition on COVID being sufficient enough not to make unification more expensive.

I didn't say anything about a 'positive effect'.

Because we could have shut the island down efficiently and avoided any costs monitoring a border. Would we have had the massive spike in numbers had we been able to do that? Only somebody qualified can quantify if that would have been a net saving versus a net cost. But of course the negative campaign you have to indulge comes into play immediately.

That's just my instinct on it. I checked what I wrote and clearly said it was what " i thought" and "I think".We were never going to be COVID free.

Also, COVID has already had its negative effect on the economy. Unification is too late on that one. The models will now incorporate our increased debt . I reckon that might make unification more difficult.

Nothing to back that up just my opinion but Fitzgerald's upcoming paper might include it depending on the cut off point he set.

As you say, it's on the agenda now. We'll know from the next few opinion polls what the public think about it.

Why's that? It's fresh in all our minds.

Yeah might not have a specific question but it would still figure in the overall number.

Francie didn't pay much attention to it at the time but having a Google about it and wiki etc wouldn't say they nearly won it.

They gained a lot of ground but there was only one poll showing a win for independence and there were a lot of polls done.

In the end the No vote was higher than that predicted in the polls. The gap dropped from 17 to 11%.

Looking at the Ashcroft poll that followed, the economy was an important factor as you would expect.