Mr. Glenn Carr:

In the first month we have seen a significant shift to direct services. Our continental freight, as I said earlier, is up 446%; our UK freight is down 49%. There are significant problems which are slowly being addressed, particularly in exports from the UK into Ireland. However, a lot of those challenges will form the new world we are in now, and people are working to put systems in place to address that. From our point of view, obviously, it is important we maintain those services with the UK because they will be an important part of our business going forward. At the same time, however, it needs to be recognised that there has been a fundamental change in aspects of the supply chain in Ireland, particularly directly with Europe. As a port, we have a lot of support regarding our border inspection facility. We are lucky in Rosslare. That has temporarily been built outside of the port, where all State agencies are on the one site together. From the perspective of a customer using that facility, it is working very well for anybody coming from the UK into Ireland. It means that customers go to one site and all the agencies are on that one site. As part of our master plan, we are incorporating the longer term Border inspection facility inside the port and working closely with the State agencies and the Office of Public Works on that. Very important for us is the road network and its continued improvement. We have already seen the benefits of the Oilgate bypass. Any road connectivity improvement makes Rosslare more attractive and helps relieve pressures in Dublin, which, we should not forget, were there before Covid. We are delighted with the performance of the first month. Despite all the additional traffic, we have managed to ensure that 98% of ships have left the port on time. We have also started our master plan for the port, amounting to €35 million.

That will bring other benefits for the roll-on-roll-off traffic in terms of space and availability. I would say that things are working well at the moment from a port perspective. That said, I am mindful that we are not seeing two very important aspects of our business to the full potential, one being passengers. Normally, we would have approximately 800,000 passengers going through the port. We obviously are not seeing that at the moment and probably will not see that for the remainder of this year given the restrictions. The UK traffic is also down 49%. The unknown at this point, and it will take another couple of months for this to work through, is how much of that traffic may migrate back to the land bridge or how many companies will revert to trading with some of their UK suppliers. We should also bear in mind that the UK starts some of its introductions of customs from 1 April. Its commitment is the full implementation of its systems from 1 July. We can, therefore, expect to see additional problems, mainly, again, on the UK side. My experience has been that UK industry has been poorly prepared for Brexit. While there have been some teething problems with some of the systems on our side, I believe one would find the bulk of the problems are very much on the British side.