Professor Graham Butler:

The Deputy is absolutely right. The legal challenges about enforcement of this can come in numerous ways. For example, one could be that a good is directly imported. It arrives at Dublin Airport or Dublin Port, whichever it may be and is prohibited on entry. There could also be the case that goods end up in the jurisdiction and arrive on the counter of a supermarket and then for one reason or other, another authority like the Garda or the Health and Safety Authority, examines the goods and then questions the process by which the goods have entered the State in the first place. Therefore, the goods might be seized. It would obviously open questions about how the goods ended up from the point of view of sale, the distributors that got them onto the shelf, the actual importer, or whether they came from a third state or another EU member state. These are all questions of enforcement that we know now are left open.

To come back to EU law, which is where I entered this debate, I am not sure that these issues have been fully considered. Therefore, if the State wants to be true to its policy objective here, the full range of issues would have to be considered and the nuances for the full enforcement of this public policy aim would have to be considered in how the Bill is precisely structured and to how much it wants to build enforcement powers into the existing authorities and their own mandates. It is not just the issue of the Revenue Commissioners, per se, at the point of entry for direct imports. There is obviously the post-import phase to question whether these indirect imports have even complied with the full requirements that EU law and national law provide.