Mr. Howard Knott:

While I would not dare jump ahead of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, I would like to address the Deputy's final point on the possibility that competitiveness issues will arise. A significant number of ports were transferred into local authority control under previous legislation. While I am not an expert on fisheries, fishery ports such as Killybegs and Castletownbere operate under a slightly different model from other ports, one which involves the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. In general terms, what we have heard from those involved in exports is that the ports that transferred have functioned well because they are small ports serving their local communities and doing what they have always done. These ports have not appeared on the national radar to any significant degree. Apart from locals and those involved in sailing, most people will not be aware of Clogherhead, Annagassan and similar ports.

This legislation deals with chunky and substantial ports such as Drogheda, Dún Laoghaire, New Ross and Galway. While these are small ports in the greater scale of things, if one strips out the large cargo items from some of the larger ports, for example, the ore that moves through Shannon-Foynes Port and the oil that moves in and out of Dublin and Cork ports, especially the latter, one finds that the difference between many of the larger and smaller ports in terms of the general cargo they carry is not significant.

None of the ports with which we are concerned currently have car or freight ferries running, nor do they have container vessels carrying containers in and out. One needs to have a serious throughput for these types of activity and the tier 1 and 2 ports can handle these types of traffic. There is, however, a substantial amount of traffic related to the agriculture and construction sectors for which local ports are vital. While it may not be appropriate to make this point, the domestic waste issues that have arisen in recent years, specifically the need to avoid landfill, mean that considerable amounts of waste have been exported for use as fuel, particularly to the Baltic countries. The use of smaller ports for this purpose has provided a great boost to the business of some of them. However, this development also highlights one of the dangers in this discussion, namely, that this traffic may only go through a port if the local authority grants it a licence to do so. As a result of the legislation, the port owner and licensing authority will become very close. It is important, therefore, to create a Chinese wall between a local authority's port activities and its other activities.