Mr. Gerry Harrahill:

I will make a couple of comments and invite my colleague, Ms O'Neill, to comment as well. One of the challenges in the new trading environment is that, as the Chairman correctly pointed out, we can have a truck with 50 consignments for 50 different customers. In the case of 49 of the customers, the particular consignment may be green-routed but the remaining consignment may be red or orange-routed. That means the entire truck and its contents will be delayed while the issue is resolved.

We have consistently pointed out to those in trade and business the importance of understanding that groupage loads carry with them a risk that, for example, one consignment out of 50 could cause an entire load to be delayed. We have suggested in our seminars, as have colleagues in the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, that businesses think about the goods that are more likely to get a risk routing compared with others. Let us suppose someone mixes sanitary and phytosanitary products with general groupage. Clearly there is a greater likelihood of that consignment being delayed than a general groupage consignment. That is one practical element.

The second element, which I touched on in my opening statement and which may be worth repeating, is that we have made available a facility for hauliers to be able to look up the MRNs for all the consignments that are on the truck and they will know whether it is one consignment or ten consignments that are giving rise to the difficulty. It is an issue that will still have to be resolved but, for example, if one has an unaccompanied load in Dublin Port, rather than turning up to collect it when there are three consignments that are still red routed, one knows, from an economic point of view, that if one wants to collect a load that has been green routed, one can go down, collect it and leave the port without difficulty. I hope that practical element of providing visibility in respect of the MRNs will be of considerable assistance to hauliers.