Mr. John O'Gorman:

I thank Deputies for their questions. I might deal with some of the questions and I will then defer to my colleague in Brussels, Ms Graham, and to Mr. Farrell.

The first question was from an import-export point of view. The co-op organisations in Ireland we represent buy products from our members, that is, milk, grain and so on, but we also supply them with competitively priced inputs for their farms, such as hardware, animal welfare products and a wide range of other products. Obviously, if there is going to be an export tariff for anything leaving the EU going into the UK market, anything coming from the UK market into the Irish market will probably suffer the same cost rises. That would affect the profitability of the farmers who are our members. I hope that goes some way towards explaining the point.

On the erosion of consumer spending power in the UK, the governor of the Bank of England said that a hard Brexit could have a more severe effect on the UK economy than Covid is having or will have. That calls out to me that there are very negative consequences of a hard Brexit from an Irish perspective and an EU perspective, but also from a UK consumer spending power perspective.

We are fortunate that Irish food and drink outputs consumed in the UK generally attract a reasonable premium over and above what other products on the shelves attract. The ability of the UK consumer to purchase at a premium will be reduced. Obviously, products coming from outside of the EU, produced to different environmental, animal welfare, labour law standards and so forth, will be more competitive than what we produce.