Mr. Brian McGrath:

I will pick that up from a master planning perspective. We completed the third of three strategic plans. There has been a 15-year period where we have transformed the port in terms of its diversification and everything. We just delivered the most recent plan as the Covid-19 lockdown pretty much hit. We had already written what is the outline of a 30-year master plan for the port. We are just about to work on the next five-year plan as a subset of that 30-year master planning.

What we did instead was that we put a strategy bridge in which would take us to 2023, because we recognised that there was no point in moving forward into a long-term strategic plan in view of the fact that there were so many variables in the emergency situation. In addition to Covid, there are the matters of COP26 and the climate emergency. The latter are to the fore in terms of our concerns about the need to shift from carbon-based products to different things. Our master plan is sitting there ready to go. We have planned for an extensive community engagement in that master plan and that will include community engagement in the Republic with the community in Greencastle and our other stakeholders around the Derry area and beyond.

I take Mr. Hazzard's point about silos. We have learned the lesson that we need to align our strategy and master planning with programmes for government and policies. We were complaining to our Department for Infrastructure asking why it was not using the ports as a major leverage for regional economic development because it sometimes works in silos too. We are now saying that we need to look at where the policy vehicles are that we can attach to and that we can use for our benefit so that we are in concert with Government policy. We also need to make the arguments from the bottom up as to why we should be a good partner for Government in these enterprises. That is where we are with it and we are making good progress on that but perhaps we sat back too long and thought that other people would recognise that it might be worthwhile to use us. Then we were put out a bit when nobody called us. We need to be proactive on that, and we are keen to do that in both jurisdictions.