Ireland very exposed to hard Brexit: ESRI

Ireland would be the worst hit if Britain continues to head down the path toward a ‘hard Brexit’ divorce with Brussels, an in-depth Irish study of exports and imports across the EU has revealed.

The country’s leading experts on Brexit, Martina Lawless and Edgar Morgenroth at the Economic and Social Research Institute (the ESRI) have today unveiled the findings of the first ever international product-by-product study.

The results show that the EU’s exports to the UK would drop 30%, while UK-to-EU exports would fall 22%, under standard EU tariffs —commonly called the hard Brexit — when the UK formally leaves the trading bloc, which is expected by the spring of 2019.