Ms Lorna Meaney:

I will start with the inter-institutional process and where things go from here. The draft proposals have been made and will be discussed at European Council and European Parliament level. At Council level working party sessions will be set up where experts from all member states will discuss these proposals and try to come to and agree a common position on the articles. I would stress the fact that at the moment this is a draft proposal. It is not set in stone and there will have to be agreement across the member states on it. There will be much debate, I would imagine, on a lot of these articles at the working party meetings to find this common position and it is likely to be a slow process. It will also be discussed at Parliament level and once consensus is reached at Council and Parliament, it can then proceed to be enacted. If consensus cannot be reached then it has to go through a conciliation committee and again, that will take time. That committee will strive to come to a common position on it. If that is successful, it can go forward to be voted on again in the Parliament and at Council. That is basically how it works but I would stress that this is at a very preliminary stage. These are draft proposals and it is likely to take some time for them to be finally agreed.

I will move on now to the question about TRACES, the trade control and expert system computer platform.

Currently, it is used to apply official controls to our imports. Our imports must be notified through it. We use it to produce our intra-community trade certificates. We now use e-certification on that system to certify our live animals within the European Union.

Unfortunately, it is not very clear in the legislation how TRACES will do this. That is all to be agreed and decided on by the Commission. It is therefore difficult to give the Senator any idea about the administrative burden or the costs to the Department of agriculture and to industry in relation to this. It is very hard to say, but I will say that transport authorisations, certificates of competence and vehicle approval certificates are all currently paper-based. One would think that moving to digitised system should reduce the administrative burden. It would probably be much more efficient and would make it much easier to enforce these.