Mr. Paul Lynam:

Senator Gallagher raised a few points that I would like to come back to. In terms of North-South trade, Senator McDowell started the ball rolling. First, we should say that North-South trade, unlike the overall UK figures that we gave earlier on, has increased quite significantly in the first number of months of Brexit.

Northern Irish sales to the Republic are up 52% whereas in the opposite direction the trade figures have increased by 40% so there is potential to grow them. We should say that many North-South initiatives have worked very well. The single electricity market that operates on the island of Ireland is the only single electricity market between two jurisdictions in the world that operates as efficiently as it does. We know of the Enterprise service and the great success story that Tourism Ireland is in marketing the island of Ireland as a whole. Of course, we want to do more research. The planning system and funding need to be looked at. Funding will be debated in terms of the merits of every scheme. The Government has committed to doing a lot more on North-South infrastructure funding. We have two diverse planning systems and we would like to see better co-operation between the planning systems North and South so that perhaps they would meet more through a stakeholder forum in this regard. It is no good having planning approval in the Republic if it is not getting approved in the North to complete the project and vice versa. We would like to see a lot more in this area.

With regard to getting an airing of views, it is very important with Covid, and with Brexit being a reality, that we do not lose the spotlight on how important UK-Ireland trade is and the challenge Brexit will be to businesses. We hope we will still get the same airing as we have had previously. Something we have called for since 2017, which was realised in budget 2019, was the Brexit contingency or mitigation fund, which allows money for unexpected things that will happen due to Brexit. We would like to see this funding and these resources continue to protect our businesses. As has been said, agriculture has taken a disproportionate hit. We would also like to see more detail on the Brexit mitigation fund. We will get approximately €1 billion from the European Union and we would like to see exactly where it is going and the input business can have on it.

With regard to some of our asks, we have been raising these issues in the various forums we are on. We sit on the Brexit stakeholder forum of the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Coveney. Mr. McGrane sits on the trade forum of the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Brandon Lewis. I sit on the customs consultative forum. We feed into these but more needs to be done in these areas.

Something we would like to see is an investment council akin to what was recently established in the UK, whereby various business representative groups feed into the Government process as opposed to a limited number of business representative groups. Different challenges face different groups. We offer a unique perspective because of how impacted our trade is. Perhaps the committee might consider looking at the UK model and adapting it. Of course it would not be like for like in terms of Ireland's success story with IDA Ireland. We are not looking for that but for something that would allow other representative groups to feed in, especially as we come out of these choppy waters.