Mr. Patrick Daly:

As for what we do if Britain crashes out sooner rather than later, we do business with many countries every day that are not members of the European Union yet we do business with them. We do business with China, the US and so on. Many of the companies that are doing business in those countries are larger companies and many of them have sought what is called AEO, approved economic operator, status, whereby their logistics systems are approved from a security and integrity point of view by a recognised body and then that foreign country accepts that AEO status and that facilitates the entry of their goods into that country, lowers costs and speeds up the supply chain. In the worst case, we would expect that AEO recognition would still exist between the UK and the European Union. Up to now my understanding is that in Ireland only the very larger companies and some of the big logistics service companies that carry goods on behalf of shippers have taken the trouble to go down the route of getting AEO approval but many more would do that and will do that. At the events we have been holding in our supply chain series in recent weeks, which will continue, we hear SMEs talking about those things already.

In terms of an alternative distribution route, on the supposition that it is a bad exit and the costs become prohibitive to coming through the UK and using the landbridge, the point Deputy Ryan made is very pertinent, in that it is not only what is coming from the UK that is made in the UK but what is coming through the UK even though it may have originated in Holland, Belgium or France because there would be customs clearance entering the UK on one side and the other and then a customs clearance here in Ireland.

Lots of good coming from far afield come to Ireland through transhipment in Felixstowe or Liverpool. If that became a problem then we would be looking at ports like Rotterdam and Antwerp and perhaps Le Havre. One of the issues is that many companies in continental Europe who are doing business with Ireland, in particular in consumer goods, view Ireland if not politically at least geographically as an appendix of Britain and from a distribution point of view, there is a big distribution centre somewhere in the UK and Ireland is served from it. The reason they do that is because the volumes and the economy make sense, so if that becomes prohibitive and one has to do it from the Continent direct to Ireland those volumes will be much smaller because our economy is one tenth the size of the UK economy and consequently the unit costs will go up. What would happen is that while the costs would go up because of the physicality of the distribution channel and the distances and times, it would require a lot of innovation on the part of operators to see what they could do to streamline the processes if their costs were going up here in order to improve communication and integrate better with France, Holland, Belgium and so on. We would get through it, possibly with higher costs, but in the challenge of doing it we would become stronger and we would learn how to do business better. In a way, Brexit is breaking Irish-owned SMEs out of the complacency that I think has gone on for too long, in terms of doing business easily with the United Kingdom.