Mr. Brendan Gleeson:

The first part of the question was whether there is co-operation. We have really close co-operation with the people in the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, DEFRA, in London, and the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs, DAERA, in London and in Northern Ireland. We have regular meetings with them. We talk through all the controls with them and we try to iron out any practical issues that we see arising from their proposals. We do not have any say in what they propose, but we certainly engage with them in detail.

In the context of Northern Ireland, there is the Windsor Framework now which provides certain dispensations for product going into Northern Ireland and not going beyond that. Rules will be agreed with the European Union about what those controls are to be and they have to be applied. We must have confidence that the Northern Irish authorities will apply them because if we did not have confidence in that, for example, there could be all kinds of other consequences that flow from that. They have agreed a framework. They are professional people.