BRIAN Lenihan is a Man With A Plan. Unfortunately, his plan appears to be to wait and see what the Brits do and then copy it. Isn't that where the lemmings went wrong?

As the scale of the losses to the Irish economy from shoppers heading north to pick up bargains becomes ever more apparent, all the Minister for Finance could talk about last week was the differential in VAT rates between the two jurisdictions, throwing out hints that he might do something to bring down the Irish rate if Britain's chancellor kept its rate down below ours -- or then again he might not. It depends.

The beauty of it was, Lenihan announced, that their budget comes first, so he could hang fire on what happens before acting.

Meanwhile, out flows more money from the country like air from a busted tyre.

A quarter of a million Irish families are now regularly doing their shopping north of the border. That's up 50,000 in a year. Alcohol sales in Northern Ireland have leapt by 30 per cent as a result ("intoxication once again", as the old song might have put it), while a study found that 70 per cent of vehicles in the car parks of shopping centres in Newry and Enniskillen bore Southern number plates.

Last weekend, Southerners made up half of all visitors to The Outlet shopping centre on the A1 to Belfast, and they handed over 80 per cent of all the money spent there.

Southern shoppers are also travelling further afield, to towns which, a short while ago, they would barely have known existed, except as a half-buried memory of some alarming items on the news involving men in balaclavas.

In the circumstances, the minister's assurance that there will be no repeat of last year's pre-Christmas exodus of the Republic's money to Ulster's tills sounds ever more hollow. The horse has already bolted. There's no stable door left to lock.

Of course, it could be that the Minister of Finance will be galvanised into fiddling with VAT rates in the near future, but he can't genuinely believe it's going to make any difference to the exodus of money. The gap between the British and Irish rates of VAT widened in the last year because the British, in an effort to stimulate their faltering retail sector, reduced the standard rate to 15 per cent, while ours went up to 21.5 per cent.

But the UK rate is going back up to 17.5 per cent in January, so the pressure for Mr Lenihan to do anything is diminishing with every passing week. Time will close a large part of that gap for him. More worryingly for him, it would probably make little difference to the trend towards shopping in the North even if the two sides of the border had the same rate of VAT. Nobody is wasting their weekend sitting behind the wheel of a car solely in order to save a few per cent here and there on their weekly shopping bill.

They're making the journey because they can't afford not to. The cost of practically everything is significantly cheaper up north. In the middle of a recession, it's a no-brainer. It's one of the few ways left for people on tight budgets to feel positive and take control.

Thousands more would be doing the same if they realised how much they'd be saving by following suit. Despite all the hoo-hah in the media, many Irish people still don't know how much more they've been expected to pay over the years for the privilege of shopping in their own country. It's not a few euro. Practically every single item purchased in the six counties is significantly cheaper than it is anywhere in the other 26 -- including food, and you can't blame VAT for that, because there is no VAT levelled on most food.

None the less, the Herald last week carried a consumer column which claimed that, unless you lived along the border, or were buying a large-scale item such as a television, the cost of travelling to the North from further afield would wipe out any gains made at the tills. With all due respect, that just isn't true. The Belfast Telegraph's Price Watch campaign actually matched up identical items on sale in stores in Dundalk and Newry, and found that the amount saved by driving those extra few miles was an astonishing 53 per cent.

Show me someone who can afford to ignore a 50 per cent price difference in their shopping bill, and I'll show you Bono.

One Dublin woman to whom the newspaper spoke last month went north every month and said she saved hundreds of euro by buying all her groceries at Sainsbury's near Belfast.

As a native Northerner, I'm up and down across the border regularly, and I invariably come back these days from my trips home with the boot full. And sorry, minister, but with Christmas approaching I'm sure I'll be going even more frequently. Needs must.

As a long-term strategy for national recovery, it's madness, I know it is,

because this collective northwards migration of spending can only impoverish the country further. It's a vicious circle.

But calls to patriotism don't cut any ice when unemployment and repossession are genuine and scary prospects for many ordinary families. For them, it's not a choice between buying what they want on their doorstep or buying it in another country. It's a choice between buying it in another country or not buying it at all.

Brian Lenihan would understand that if he ever bothered simply asking the shoppers who are flowing north every weekend why they're going, rather than getting all his information from pointy-headed advisers and statistics-heavy financial reports.

The last thing they'd tell him is that it was the VAT wot did it.

Still, at least he can console himself with the thought of how all this cash is helping keep the peace in Ulster. No way are Northerners going to risk driving away all that lovely loot by starting up the Troubles again.

Sunday Independent