Ms Celine O'Neill:

We meet regularly with our counterparts in HMRC to discuss the operational implementation of their requirements and although they have been delayed, they will happen from October and January 2022. The good thing for our traders, from the EU perspective, is that the export requirements are already being met. They came in on 1 January and there have been little to no difficulties for our exporters in providing their customs export declarations. The challenge that might arise is if those same exporters are responsible for the import formalities on the UK side. That is dealt with by incoterms, which determine the end of the supply chain responsible for the customs import formalities. For some, controlled goods import declarations were required from 1 January for the UK. Depending on whether it is the Irish company and whether it has an establishment in the UK, it will have been making declarations already so hopefully the impact will not be as great when those requirements kick in later on in the year. The other point to make is that the requirements mirror the EU requirements. The information that is required on our declarations is exactly the same as that required on the UK side so hopefully businesses will be very familiar, at that stage, with those requirements if they are responsible for lodging the declarations.

As the commissioner mentioned in his opening remarks, we introduced a customs roro service which allows all of the information on the imports to be tied together and presented to Revenue and other agencies in advance of the arrival of the shipment. The UK will be introducing a very similar model called the GVMS. We have been talking to them regularly about the requirements for that to try to mirror them as far as possible and align them with what is happening with the customs roro service so that when the time comes and the system needs to be interacted with, it will be as streamlined as possible and as familiar to traders as the customs roro service.