Dr. Gary Kearney:

As part of our role in promoting food safety, we hold quite a number of workshops, especially with food SMEs across the island. The focus of those workshops is not on legislation, guidelines or anything relating to that, because our sister agencies look after that element. We focus on education relating to food safety, such as food hygiene, allergens, what to do if one receives an adverse report, how to interpret microbiology results and so on. As members will appreciate, some food SMEs might only have one or two people involved and so will not have the necessary knowledge. We fill that gap. This year alone, we held 12 different workshops across the island. They did not raise the issue of Brexit. They tend to approach the Food Safety Authority of Ireland or the Food Standards Agency. We work with LEOs but food safety is just one of a dozen different things that a food SME has to think about it. It is a core element. If they get food safety wrong, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. We try to upskill the food SMEs and increase their capacity to provide good food safety in the production of their food.

We are a promoter. We do not have a big stick. We are facilitators and try to encourage various organisations to come together. We have done that for the guts of 20 years. That is why an open border is fantastic. It creates awareness of others working in the same field and develops a strong network across stakeholders. We get various organisations working together. Not to labour the point, but one example is when we got a number of food microbiology laboratories together from the two jurisdictions which had not liaised or worked together before. We developed an agenda related to them, stepped back and moved along. Not long after that initiative, laboratories in Northern Ireland were auditing those in the South voluntarily. It was all about developing working relationships relating to common areas and mutual benefit. It is not just doing it for the sake of doing it. There is value in it. We try to do that with the workshops. We bring various partners in, such as our sister agencies. Those people can give value to those small companies which produce food.