Mr. Simon McKeever:

I thank the Chair and the committee and for the invitation to come back. I can reassure the committee not an awful lot has got better since we were last here. I do not propose to read the first page of my submission which is just general introductory remarks and I will start in the middle of page two of our submission.

The Irish Exporters Association, IEA, welcomed the Joint Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine’s invitation to contribute and we thank the committee for having us here today. We have taken note of the various challenges and recommendations the committee addresses in its publication for the European Union, Ireland-UK trade relations as well as trade, competition, and other sector-specific policies.

In particular, we welcome the report’s acknowledgement of the various challenges and risks Brexit presents to Irish businesses through likely reductions in exports to the UK and increased competition with UK exporters in other market, including our own market, particularly if the pound stays the way it is at the moment, as well as the potentially negative impacts of the reintroduction of tariffs and customs.

Since the publication of the joint committee’s report in February 2017, negotiations on the United Kingdom’s withdrawal had successfully reached sufficient progress in December 2017 with the publication of the draft withdrawal agreement in February 2018.

Although, according to EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier, between 90% and 95% of the withdrawal agreement is finalised, key differences surrounding the Republic of Ireland-Northern Ireland Border, the Good Friday Agreement and protected geographical indicators continue to hold up negotiations.

As I go through our submission, I will draw on an ongoing piece of research we do, which is our Export Eye survey. We have updated it to include some new bits and pieces. We have been running this survey for the last couple of years and have some early indications of what people are saying and we thought it would be very useful to bring it in today.

On the recommendations of other parliamentary reports on agriculture, food and the marine, we have taken note of them, including the Seanad Special Select Committee on the Withdrawal of the UK from the EU’s June 2017 report, Brexit: Implications and Potential Solutions. In particular, the IEA welcomes the report’s detailed analyses of the potential impacts and responding solutions needed to address the different potential post-Brexit scenarios for an Ireland-UK trading relationship.

To get into the meat of what we want to tell the committee today, we will discuss preparations and preparedness for Brexit and the current status of negotiations, including any agreement on the future EU-UK relationship. While an increasing number of Irish exporters across the varying business sectors are stepping up their Brexit preparedness, a still large number of IEA members do not have either preparedness or mitigation plans in place. This, by and large, is due to the largely complex and in-flux nature of the ongoing negotiations on the UK withdrawal agreement. IEA members continue to state their concern about the large number of unknown unknowns, and the difficulty to understand how or what to prepare for. In any case, with the assistance of ourselves and others, member and non-member businesses have already undertaken significant steps to diversify their export markets and to train and educate their respective staff on the customs and other procedures.

According to initial responses from the IEA's ongoing Brexit and its impact on your business survey, nine out of ten IEA members who responded to the question are very or somewhat aware of the implications of a soft or hard Brexit scenario on their business operations. Almost 75% of initial responses stated that they are extremely or very aware of the state of play in the ongoing Brexit negotiations. The converse of that is that 25% are somewhat in the dark about it as well, which is something of a worry.

In general, IEA members have put in place Brexit impact mitigation measures, with preliminary results of our survey indicating that, of those that have responded to this question, all had decided to put in place at least one Brexit mitigation measure. However, at the same time only slightly more than half of all respondents indicated that they have a formal or non-formal impact mitigation plan in place. Of those members with a mitigation plan in place, the deadline for implementation is between January and March 2019.

Anecdotally, many of our companies have asked about how much this will cost and are sitting with their finger on the button. I was talking to one company recently that has actually decided to spend the money it has earmarked for it. By and large, companies are not. They are waiting with their finger on the buzzer to see if they implement this or not.

Plans are predominantly designed around a no-deal scenario for a six month period. That is particularly concerning for us because very recently, at a round table discussion we had with a number of our members, some of them told us that they had these mitigation plans in place but the measures they had taken would only last for six months. That is particularly worrying.