Mr. Neil McDonnell:

As someone who has been dealing with the Brexit issue in quite a level of detail for four-and-a-half years, when I got into the long grass and the detail of Mr. Roche's correspondence with the Revenue, it took me some time. In our opening address, one sees some of the detail in that boiled down to four simple points. The back of our submission includes Mr. Roche's full set of correspondence with the Revenue.

I agree with Senator Dooley that we can put a little bit more meat on the bones. We are not saying this by way of criticism of the Revenue. We just got to a trade and co-operation agreement, TCA, at the eleventh hour on Christmas Eve. We went into hard Brexit on 2 January and we are not three months into this yet. On the one hand, this is early days but as Mr. Nelson cited the CSO figures, what one has witnessed since 1 January is a massive stockpiling by importers ahead of 31 December to mitigate what was going to happen afterwards. Businesses such as Roche Freight intermediate transactions between a UK exporter and an Irish importer and vice versa. A lot of what we are trying to fix when we talk about the Revenue is that we are dealing with economic operators registration and identification, EORI, numbers that begin with the consignor and we are handling money as intermediates on behalf of the consignor.

We absolutely understand that the Revenue has duties to catch on behalf of the Exchequer. We also understand that the Revenue has to manage VAT in a way that it did not before. However, there are ways of reducing that administration if we can get the heads around the table quickly. Although there is considerable detail in it, if we got to grips with the sort of detail that Roche Freight manages on a day-to-day basis, it would give the committee a faster understanding of what needs to be done. If we could get to a phytosanitary and veterinary agreement on an island, Northern Ireland and Great Britain basis quickly, it would solve the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine problem straight away. I believe the way ahead is to divide up the problem into a bunch of smaller problems. I am happy to correspond with the clerk and give Senator Dooley and the committee whatever information is needed from ISME and Roche Freight.