Ms Celine O'Neill:

The commissioner mentioned all the engagement we have had since the beginning of the year, in particular with the Irish Road Haulage Association. If you do not mind indulging me for a moment, Chair, the particular difficulty being faced by those in the haulage sector is that they are moving these goods on behalf of customers but they are not always the declarant, so they are not entitled to a lot of the information around the products or what is causing delays when they arrive. We have been doing a lot of work with that sector in particular to make the experience a bit better. We have a number of developments in train or that have already been released. One of the key concerns from the sector was the manual provision of information. We have developed a number of application programming interfaces, APIs, to allow their computer systems to talk to our computer systems, thereby to reduce the number of interactions and manual interventions. That work is well under way and it is being discussed with the relevant stakeholders. I hope within the next few weeks we will have something available to them and then they can talk to their software provider as well and get that up and running.

The difficulty in providing information is that we need to be concerned with confidentiality, but we have already put in place an email system whereby we can give additional information on movement and what is causing the difficulty, while respecting privacy concerns. That will be a bit more automated as well in the coming weeks.

The customs ro-ro service was mentioned earlier, which is the main method of communication with the haulage sector to indicate whether controls are required when the hauliers arrive. As part of the messaging that is sent through that system, we will be able to give that additional detail automatically going forward instead of having to request it at the moment.

One of the big requests from the sector as well was to be able to see the details of the pre-boarding notification, PBN, that has been provided to Revenue so that the haulier will have a record of all of the different declarations that were included in the PBN, so we will be making that available as well.

One of the other concerns was how they get their routing information, how they know they need to come in for a control when they arrive in Ireland. That did require the driver to look up channel information on the Revenue website. We already have additional functionality in the Customs RoRo service whereby two mobile phone numbers and an email address can be included and the information will be automatically sent to those contact points about 30 minutes before the goods arrive in Ireland. We are also working with the ferry operators to put screens on board that will show the route per vehicle, hopefully in the drivers' lounge.

On non-electronic declarations, the majority of customs declarations are submitted electronically but there are certain declarations, say an ATA Carnet for a temporary admission, which is a paper-based document and unfortunately those do require stops at the port on arrival to verify the paperwork but we are seeing what enhancements we can put in place to try to pre-clear some of those so not all those goods will have to stop in the port when they arrive.

I noticed Mr. Harrahill had his hand up but I got there before him so maybe he might like to come in as well.