Dr. Martina Lawless:

I thank the Senator. In terms of where the trade has diverted, there have been large increases in imports from Northern Ireland. There has been a relatively even spread between increases in imports from the rest of the EU and changes in imports from the rest of the world. We looked to see if trade had diverted from any one individual member state, such as France or Belgium, where links would be strong, but we were not able to identify it as being driven by an individual country. It seems the increase and the change in supply chains were relatively evenly spread.

As to where the trade has fallen particularly sharply in food and beverages, it is more the case that those particular sectors were notably impacted, whereas in other sectors we were not able to attribute fully any falls in trade to a definitively Brexit impact rather than other issues such Covid-19, which was reducing trade flows overall. We did not identify any particular areas where trade had increased.

The Senator mentioned services. I should highlight that this analysis is focused entirely on goods trade. The reason for this is that the data on goods trade is released monthly whereas we will not have any official data on services trade until early next year because it is only released on an annual basis.