CHIEF economist with Davy, Conall MacCoille, described Brexit as “a live issue’’ for the financial sector but sounded a strong note of cautious optimism when addressing the Horse Sport Ireland ‘No Deal’ Brexit seminar.

Illustrating graphs of the major banks’ share prices - all falling - MacCoille said that the trend was for consumer confidence also falling back with the general economic prospects nervous.

Amid massive corporate de-leveraging, the house price index for the greater Dublin area, including Meath, Kildare, Wicklow, has slowed down while at the top end of the Dublin market, people are now cautious about spending more than €500,000 plus in the face of Brexit.

What does a cliff-edge Brexit look like? MacCoille said: “The first thing that might hit us are tariffs which would have an enormous effect on agriculture and indigenous industry sectors. Some parts of trade could become illegal overnight, we could be hit with Rules of Origin checks, Import Licences, Tariffs and Non-Tariff Barriers. The UK is still a key trading partner for our indigenous industries such as agriculture. If sterling goes to parity with the euro, there could be big falls in equity and consumers will start to save.”

Maintaining that the status quo would be held, the economist said that he believed that the UK would still “remain in the market until 2021. You could be looking at the UK in the single market to the mid 2020s with no change to the rules in that transition period.

“Then you could have the Backstop or the Free Trade Agreement. So in reality, there will be a number of dates, it’s more likely to have extensions of Article 50 and while there is a risk, the latest odds is 13% of a ‘No Deal’ Brexit this year. I think UK will be in the EU in 2020.”

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Director of Indirect Taxes with Grant Thornton, Marian Lee, addressed the issue of VAT rates.

If you are selling a horse from here to the UK and the customer is VAT-registered, if the UK becomes a third country, that will become a zero-rated sale. For horses brought in outside of the EU, import VAT must be paid.

Lee also advised those with contracts to sell goods/supplies to someone in the UK, that they will have to account for the VATand UK duty on the subsequent sale of these goods to the customer. “The Sunday Times did an article on this recently. So if you have a contract with customers in the UK, look at them (the contract conditions) again.”

(Latest information can be found on www.revenue.ie)