Verona Murphy (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome everybody. The IRHA is a voluntary organisation and no member is paid. We have two administrative staff. The president and Mr. McArdle travel around the country and have given all of their time for the past four or five years of the Brexit talks.

In 2017, the Brexit proposal put forward by the association was as follows:

The Republic of Ireland is serviced by ferries that leave the UK for Ireland and leave Ireland for the UK every 12 hours. The interval could be changed to every six hours without adding additional capacity ... In order to avoid some Irish trucks having to go through the UK, consideration should be given to creating new ferry routes from Ireland to Holland or Belgium, or resume the previous service to Dieppe in northern France. Such additions to ferry services cannot happen overnight as there is a shortage of this type of ferry. Hence a longer lead-in time and adequate planning is required.

There has been very little engagement with the IRHA as the main stakeholders but the proposals that it made in 2017 are now what is required a month away from Brexit.

I commend Mr. Aidan Coffey and his team in DFDS who engaged with the right people. I ask him if his engagement was negative from the perspective of competition in the market, from both the Department and the Irish Maritime Development Office, IMDO.

I commend Mr. Mathieu from Brittany Ferries. Mr. McArdle and I travelled with a contingent that to Haropa, Le Havre to meet representatives of Brittany Ferries. What transpired was a route between Rosslare and Bilbao, Spain. We would have liked Rosslare to Le Havre and there is still room for that option should Brittany Ferries consider it. The visit was very interesting. All of the work done and progress made is due to the stakeholders in the IRHA.

The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine is expected to schedule two eight-hour shifts at Rosslare Europort as opposed to a 24-hour shift going into Dublin Port. I believe that the IRHA believes that that is an adequate service, particularly when there will be a two-hour break in the middle of the day. Mr. Drennan might comment on that.

Mr. McArdle's organisation takes an awful lot of the high-end goods that Mr. O'Callaghan mentioned, particularly costly pharmaceutical products.

There has to be a viability issue with air freight. Trucks can take 26 pallets of high-value product. There is also the issue of the timeline.