Mr. Damien Roche:

It is not a potshot at the Revenue or anything. The Revenue is being helpful. However, I am looking at 35 years in customs clearance. I am probably older than many of the customs officers on site in Dublin Port and Rosslare. I figure I have a little more wisdom but I am not saying I have all the answers.

Two points that were brought up at earlier stages are critical. Roche Freight and many others have had daily departures with shipments for the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland from 1993 up to 31 December 2020. That was helpful as we would have had a shipment on the same trailer for Derry, Belfast, Cork, Galway, Wexford and Dublin. However, we cannot do that now and we are being told we have to separate them. The cumbersome nature of this was briefed in our presentation. We are one of a few companies that can provide a biweekly departure from the UK office in Swansea for south-west England shipments going to Northern Ireland. Under the trader support system it takes 24 hours to get a full answer back that we can present to the UK Border Force in the ports of Fishguard and Pembroke. We have to hold freight back that we would have normally co-loaded with Republic of Ireland freight. Previously, we would have moved it on a 24-hour or 48-hour basis. We cannot do that now so there has to be a system put in place, as suggested when Brexit was mentioned, to allow us to clear goods to a Northern Ireland customer as easily as we clear goods for a company in Dublin. That has to be brought forward. What we were told at the time was that the economic operator identification number of a Northern Ireland company would be changed to an XI number and the computer system in Revenue would understand that and the shipment would then transfer to Rosslare and go to Northern Ireland. That is not happening. We spend up to 48 hours on moving a Northern Ireland shipment for customers we have had for 30 years.

There is another point of major concern for many importers in the Republic of Ireland and I am keen to brief on it. If a shipment is bought in Germany by a UK company distributor and an Irish company buys from that UK distributor - something the company may have been doing for more than 30 years - then the shipment loses its country of origin status although it has come from Germany, Italy or France. The Irish company that buys the goods from the UK distributor has to pay the full rate of duty as if the shipment had come from China, America, or Australia even though the country of origin stamp on the product is from Germany, Italy or France. The company has to pay the full rate of duty. The officials in Revenue in Rosslare cannot understand why that is the case. The answer given is that it is preferential treatment and it has been lost by the exporter in transition from the European Union to the UK. I cannot understand how, simply because a shipment came through a wholesaler in the UK, it cannot hold its European Union origin status. The position is that because the customer in Ireland has bought it from a UK distributor, the customer has to pay the full rate of duty again. I would love to know the answer to that.