Mr. Liam Irwin:

On the tenfold increase in paperwork, assuming that the United Kingdom will be outside the customs union, the reality is that it will be a third country and that all trading transactions will be subject to customs declarations, although this would not necessarily mean customs duties.

That is normally facilitated through economic operators. There is a cost, clearly. We are already deeply engaged with trade. One of my colleagues, who is the assistant secretary in this area, was in Galway this morning talking to the Irish Exporters Association about the training and registration processes which might apply in the event of these things happening. So we are engaging.

The Senator asked about the additional resources we had in IT. At this stage we do not need them; our existing resource is examining and scaling the system with some consultancy assistance. We have a commitment from Government for whatever funding we will need to scale our IT systems. As I mentioned earlier, in the context of the Union customs code, we need to undertake significant investment between now and 2020 on that and the changes to what we call our AEP system would be included in that overall programme. Until we do the scaling we are not quite sure what the level of investment is. It may actually not be significant because the systems were built for scalability anyway. Details of exact costs and resource requirements will come when we conduct that study which is ongoing at present.