Mr. Niall Cody:

I find this to be an interesting position to be in. The Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach has invited me in to talk about Brexit next Tuesday. I replied yesterday suggesting it might be more opportune to have the discussion some time later, given we are now in the midst of what is very much a political process.

In regard to the commentary about our requirement for Brexit, Government decisions that took place in July and September relating to the recruitment of additional staff and the case we have made, the Minister set out in an answer to a recent parliamentary question from Fianna Fáil's finance spokesman that in September the Government approved our case for additional resources from now until January 2021. The agreement was that we would require approximately 600 additional members of staff for the end of the transition period. In the decision in September, which was picked up and analysed by the media, we set out a planned recruitment campaign, which has started, and approximately 40 people in this quarter will enter a dedicated training programme for customs. In the first quarter of next year, we will hire an additional 230 officials, resulting in 270 being in place for 29 March to facilitate the ongoing engagement with industry on Brexit-related issues and the implications for customs because it tends to be the larger corporations that are engaged in importing and exporting outside the community. We agreed that over the remainder of 2019 and through the start of 2020 we will continue our recruitment process to have the 600 officials in place by the end of the transition period.

That was as it was set out at the time but when people hear the figures it is all added up together and they wonder where the new staff are, but that was the planned process. In the event of no deal, we agreed, as the Minister stated in his reply to the parliamentary question, we would have to consider how we could speed up the process of recruitment. We will not have everyone in place by April, but we will be able to speed up recruitment. We did a recent recruitment process for staff for trade facilitation. Advertisements closed in September and in excess of 3,000 people applied for the jobs. We started the interview process and the top 40 will be hired from the panel. We will continue the process of assessing, interviewing and hiring the new staff through the normal recruitment process.

In the event of a change of plan, we would have to think about how more could be brought in more quickly, but we also have other resources. One of the things we do in our organisation is redeploy, and we pride ourselves on having the flexibility to respond to events. The key issue for our planning for whatever outcome of Brexit is to ensure the information and communications technology, ICT, infrastructure is in place to cope with multiples of customs entries if the UK becomes a third country.

In budget 2017, following the Brexit referendum in June 2016, the then Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, provided for an additional €2 million to improve our ICT development and have it in place because it is the key. We used that money well and we are satisfied that we have scaled up our ICT infrastructure. It will be able to cope with significant multiples of what it could cope with in March this year.