Mr. Barry O'Connell:

It is very early days for the Windsor agreement, but I have taken the opportunity to speak to my counterpart in Belfast and to some of the terminal operators on this side of the water and across the way. The consensus seems to be that the trade has found a natural settling place over the past two years. Operators do not believe it will have a material impact on further influencing ships and volume relative to where we are at present. That is the short answer. I guess the answer has to be short because the detail has yet to emerge with regard to how the agreement could impact in another way.

With regard to land infill, further reclamation of land is not intended. We may infill some of our existing berths but we will not extend beyond our current footprint. We have stated that in the latest master plan. We will be developing within the 265 ha we have. We have been engaging with the State's services and the OPW, individually, on the 14.6 ha to see what solutions we could come up with. They are getting very little usage. That is the issue. When they were set up originally, of course, nobody knew what would happen. In hindsight, we probably over-specified it but hindsight is a 20-20 vision. It worked and everybody was thankful for that but there is an opportunity to relocate some of those services. We have the State warehouse, which is one part of our property. We also have an inland port of 44 ha that could be relocated to an even larger facility outside the port. The others could be streamlined within one building where all the services could network and perform the checks required.

We are dealing with the various State services individually, which is difficult because we have to get agreement and, to be honest, everybody is mindful of their own space. We are trying to move this along in such a way that we can free up that land, which would add approximately 20% to our capacity. It would be very important right now because we have existing pinch points.

We are continually working on the road infrastructure. We are happy with the way Dublin Port tunnel is working. We have also shared our master plan with the relevant authorities and they are confident they can handle the capacity increases that will arise as a result of the increase in volume. Within the port, we are continually working on upgrading the quality of our roads because some of them are badly in need of repair and changing layouts to make them more efficient for truck movements and flows.