Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House. It has been of interest to see how policy in this area has developed. When I served on the Culliton committee in the early 1980s, the issue then was to reproduce the efficiency of Larne at ports in this State, and I think that was substantially accomplished. Competition between ports had an impact then, and a substantial impact on the lack of efficiency at Dublin Port was achieved by competition from Waterford when the containers went there, and also from ports like Drogheda.

The scope for inter-port competition is limited, as the Competition Authority said in its report, and therefore we have to look at competition within ports, or intra-port competition. The issues raised by the Competition Authority should be addressed in this legislation, in particular the allocation of leases on terminals within Dublin Port and making sure there are enough stevedores to ensure competition. It seems that, yet again, the Competition Authority's views have been forgotten by the other Ministers around the Cabinet table, and the same happened last week in regard to the views on the conveyancing monopoly. Competition is essential in this island economy. Ministers should liaise with the Competition Authority and should take on board what I consider an excellent and impressive report by its economist, Ciarán Aylward, who also gave a presentation to TCD students.

If competition between ports is limited, and we do not look at restrictive practices within ports, particularly within Dublin Port, we are not doing any great favours to the competitiveness of Ireland as a country. In a minority report to the Murphy report on ports, which was commissioned by the then Minister, Mr. Michael Woods, I recommended that we should run ports as a business. That is what we want. Ports need customers, namely, the shipping companies and the shippers on the land side. Where they do not have them, as Senator O'Neill has just said in regard to Dún Laoghaire, it is a ghastly prospect because a lot of investment has gone in but it is sitting there, doing nothing. It is very sad to see the Dún Laoghaire harbour front in its current state, with the facilities built for Sealink, which are no longer wanted.

I am a little nervous about the local authority model. The McLoughlin report, which is gathering dust in the Custom House, showed substantial excess managerial layers in local government. I do not know if we will improve the productivity of ports by transferring them to the local authorities. I do not know many people who would come in here to say local authorities are so efficient that we should do more things through them. Given the Irish Water example, they might be thinking the opposite, namely, that we should not let the local authorities determine their definition of productivity because, when it is made explicit, as with the water charges, we can get some appalling results.

We need to look at the first recommendation of the Competition Authority on the leasing and licensing of the Dublin lo-lo terminals. The Competition Authority said this was a matter for the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport in the first instance and in November 2013 the Department was asked for its view on the leasing and licensing of Dublin lo-lo terminals as an essential part of improving the efficiency of ports. The second recommendation concerned stevedore licensing. The Competition Authority stated that, for Dublin Port, at least two new general stevedore licences should be issued by the Dublin Port company, one on the north side and one on the south of side of the port, and it recommended consideration of this by the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport. We have to address those issues.

We need more analysis of what has been happening in the south east, given that Arklow is virtually shut and Wicklow deals with a very small number of vessels, as the Minister said in his speech. What is the future of Rosslare? There is a secret report on it, and the Minister referred to some correspondence that is on the website of the Competition Authority. Has Iarnród Éireann an interest in it any longer? It removed the railway tracks and the railway now ends about a half mile before the port. If passengers try to get a passenger train through Rosslare to get on the ferry, they could face a walk of some hundreds of yards in the rain.I do not know why. We got a grant from the European Union. The buses still use the terminal but the railway mysteriously left. There is no longer any rail connection between Waterford and Rosslare Harbour.

A huge facility was put in at Belview, which is in County Kilkenny, as Senator O’Neill has reminded us. We accept that point but has it lived up to expectations? Although it has been recovering recently, why did traffic fall? Is there something in the management or in the way Waterford sells its services to customers in the freight forwarding sector? The high hopes for Belview and the Port of Waterford have not been realised. Drogheda and New Ross are both on the border between counties - Drogheda between Louth and Meath and New Ross between Kilkenny and Wexford - so which local authority do we mean? I am inclined to look askance at the idea of letting any local authority run those ports. Is local authority the model that gives the least cost result? I share people’s misgivings about Galway too. Is local government in Galway so efficient in any legendary sense that it should take over a harbour which has been doing quite well, retaining a good oil business from Whitegate? The harbour had to do the numbers on whether the oil went from Whitegate to Galway by road, rail or ship and managed to get the best contract. Will that kind of efficiency be lost if Galway Harbour goes into the local authority structure?

It is good that the very substantial loss of business from the ports in the Republic of Ireland to Larne has been won back, not by restrictive practices but by making our ports more efficient. I thank Larne and its manager, Denis Galway, for showing us how to do that. We learned the lessons and have retrieved a substantial amount of business that used to go over the Border to Larne, Warrenpoint and Belfast. Let us not eliminate the prospect of competition within Dublin Port and the remaining competition, which is probably small at this stage, as stated by Ciarán Aylward of the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission. He adds that we must improve competition within ports. When there was some mining in Kilkenny, there was a choice to go to either Cork or Waterford Ports and Cork won that competition.

I would like to see a more commercial emphasis on keeping pressure on this sector. As the Minister said, in serving an export-orientated island economy, we need ports performing at the highest level. I hope the Department and the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission will combine in their efforts to extract monopolistic rents where they still occur in the sector. Let us see the numbers to show that Galway and Drogheda would be better run by the local authority than by a separate port company, facing competition. If they are not efficient, they lose the business. Is that not the test rather than whether we see them as part of local authorities?