Ms Louise Byrne:

I want to pick up on the preparations in meeting UK import requirements that Senator Wall has correctly raised as a challenge for us all. The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine is the designated competent authority for the vast majority of affected food businesses that will have to comply with these import requirements. Other competent authorities involved with the provision of export certification include the Sea-Fisheries Protection Authority, SFPA, the local authority veterinary services and the HSE.

In the vast majority of cases, the certification requires an official veterinarian to sign off on the health certificate. We have a very significant challenge. Unlike on the import side, where controls are conducted at border control posts, we have businesses that are regionally dispersed all over the country and who have integrated supply chains with customers in the UK operating just-in-time trade supply chains and models. Things must change as we cannot provide the export certification without there being changes to processes, systems and staffing. Staff in the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, along with our colleagues across the Government, have been preparing intensively to meet these requirements. We are meeting the requirements put in place from 1 January. When those requirements kicked in on 1 January, we had to have information technology systems, staff and processes in place to support the certification.

The work is ongoing and is intensifying, given that from 1 October, the requirements in respect of products of animal origin, which is the main category of products that must meet import requirements, will lead to somewhere in the region of a fourfold increase in certification requirements. Currently we issue somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 export certificates for trade across the globe and we export food to 180 markets around the world. We are looking at that fourfold increase, not only with respect to exports to Great Britain but also exports through the land bridge. The current indication from the UK is it will require a transit certificate and IPAFFS notification for those consignments as well.

We have carried out an intensive examination of the UK requirements as set out in its border operating model. We have submitted a series of detailed questions relating to some outstanding matters. We are expecting a revised iteration of the border operating model before the end of the month but it will not be substantive enough to answer all the open questions. We are engaging directly with the United Kingdom's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, DEFRA, on those. We are expecting a further iteration of the UK border operating model in September.

On what we are doing at present given the postponement of the UK import controls, we have had regular engagement with our stakeholders, including the food business operators as well as the people who will be doing the certification, and that engagement is ongoing. We have conducted a number of internal trials from application for certification to point of certification on the Irish side and we have engaged with the border protocol delivery group and the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, DEFRA, Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, HMRC, and with our colleagues in Revenue on the Irish side, and other government departments on the UK side, in relation to end-to-end testing. We will be doing some end-to-end testing in advance of 1 October requirements in the same way as we did in advance of 1 January 2021 requirements.

We have established a supply chain working group within the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine where we are engaging directly with some of those logistics providers who are moving the goods from Ireland to Great Britain. We had a first meeting of that working group a few weeks ago and we are meeting individual companies this week. The idea of that engagement is to learn from the challenges that they faced in terms of moving goods from Great Britian into Ireland from 1 January and to make sure that we take all the learnings we can from that process so that we can apply them when the shoe is on the other foot and when we have to meet the UK import requirements.

We are obviously continuing to engage with the EU. It goes without saying in order to be able to export to the UK one has to be on a list of approved businesses. The EU will be providing that list to the UK and that list will be generated from the trade control and export system, TRACES. We are putting all of those businesses which are exporting to Great Britain on TRACES; we have the vast majority of them on the system.

We are also engaging directly with the TRACES unit in Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety, DG SANTE, to try to make that system work very well because we will be using TRACES to generate health certificates for meat and meat products and for composite products. We have a number of information technology systems that will be used to generate certificates. We have an export certification system and we have a dairy products certification system. As I say, we are engaging regularly with our food business operators to make sure that they are aware of what the requirements are and that they, too, can play their part.

We are also engaging with the HSE, with the local authority veterinary service, LAVS, with the Food Safety Authority of Ireland, FSAI, and with the Department of Health in terms of that engagement across the sector and where we can assist in terms of meeting the requirements. For instance, the local authority veterinary services will be using TRACES to generate the export certificates and we have invited their food business operators, FBOs, and their LAV staff - veterinary officers - to our training. There is a huge amount of work going on.

We will be continuing our communications with stakeholders and there will be no shortage of information and some very useful information on our website for anybody who is intending to export from 1 October.