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At 5.30am on New Years Day, a handful of trucks will leave the Irish Ferries ship Ulysses after arriving in Dublin Port after a three-hour crossing from Holyhead in Wales.
On previous Fridays, the trucks would have left the port through the Dublin Port tunnel onto the M50 and then onto their distribution centers and delivery destinations unhindered.
This Friday, these arrivals will be treated very differently.
The Ulysses will be the first loading and unloading ferry to cross the EU-UK border after the end of the Brexit transition period at 11pm on Thursday.
The Stena Estrid will arrive in Dublin from Holyhead at 11:45 p.m. on Thursday, but no customs procedures will apply to British goods on board as it left the UK before 11 p.m. on Thursday and therefore Brexit is still it had not entered into force at the time of departure.
The Ulysses will be the first ship in Dublin with trucks subject to controls not seen in a generation thanks to the EU single market that made trade between these islands fluid.
State officials speak of policing the new frontier of the EU single market created by Britain’s exit from it, and the Port of Dublin is ground zero for the Republic in this regard, and will be the most active outpost of the status for checks and inspections when Brexit comes into force.
Nowhere else in the EU will there be the same volume of loading and unloading ferry traffic subject to the scale of control that will be required for the carriage of goods by road of the Irish Sea from Friday. It will be a huge challenge for businesses, government departments, and state agencies and regulators.
Following advice
On paper, things should run smoothly, if importers, their logistics companies and their customs brokers (if they use any) have been following the advice of the Commissioners of Revenue and the Department of Agriculture to prepare for customs checks, agricultural or food safety of goods. arriving from Great Britain.
There is an alphabet soup of acronyms covering the red tape and systems that they will need to navigate to make sure truck drivers have obtained the important pre-shipment notification number (PBN) to allow them to board their ferry at Holyhead. No PBN, no ferry ride.
During the last 30 minutes of the three hour boat trip from Holyhead, truck drivers will have to check their “customs channel” to find out if they are “green routed” or “red routed”; the latter is a dreaded color that will make truck drivers’ trips even longer.
Truck drivers will be able to check this on the Revenue website. If you have a green route, they can simply exit the port upon arrival. If indicated in red, they could be instructed to call customs at Terminal 11, a large building within Dublin Port, or customs at Terminal 7 for a transit check or stamp on their goods.
If they carry live animals, they will be directed to the border control post in yard 2 in Dublin Port, where inspectors from the Department of Agriculture will be there to check the animals.
Shipments of animal and plant products or plants could be directed to a number of checks, including physical inspections, at the Department of Agriculture inspection points in the port.
The big unknowns are: how many trucks will be subject to controls, how long will the controls take and will they delay the schedules of the ferries and cause the traffic to accumulate in and out of the port?
Unprecedented checks
The smooth functioning of the EU single market since the beginning of 1993 means that these questions cannot be answered precisely. Since these trucks have never undergone these exact types of checks before, it is unclear how many shipments will need to be checked.
The strict EU single market rules on the inspection of plant and animal products, under complex sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) regulations, leave little room for maneuver to simply pass the goods.
All shipments must undergo identity and documentary checks, but for higher risk foods such as poultry, milk, eggs and honey, EU rules require veterinary inspectors to carry out physical checks on half of all these shipments that pass through the port of Dublin.
Delays will depend, to a large extent, on the preparations made by the importers themselves. If they have the paperwork in order, the goods are likely to flow more freely.
Two-thirds of shipments of agri-food and plant products from “third countries”, which Britain will become on Thursday night, are currently rejected due to incorrect paperwork.
State agencies have hired 1,500 employees and the Port of Dublin has spent € 30 million on new buildings, checkpoints and traffic distribution to prepare for checks, based on existing commercial levels: 1.2 million trailers leave the Dublin port every year and approximately 410,000 trucks enter the port.
Of those incoming trucks, around 170,000 each year have carried goods that could breach the SPS controls that will be required for goods arriving from Britain as of January 1.
Low volumes
State officials believe that new barriers to trade with Britain will inevitably mean reduced volumes of goods as companies choose to avoid the bureaucratic headache of new customs procedures and obtain multiple health certificates from veterinary or plant inspectors for multiple individual truck loads.
It will simply not be economically viable to transport some food of plant or animal origin to the country if the products generate additional paperwork and delays in physical inspections.
The first days of January are expected to be quiet and an unclear indicator of how long-term port controls might work, given the record volumes of cargo that moved through the Irish Sea in November and December when businesses piled up. in advance to avoid these new borders. control S.
Even with the record volumes of cargo arriving before Christmas, traffic was still flowing through Dublin Port smoothly, as the port experienced its busiest months on record.
The full pain of the Brexit bureaucracy may not be felt for weeks, and truckers leaving Ulysses on Friday may later decide to move goods within the single market and avoid Britain altogether, if possible, by taking ferries. Direct to and from continental Europe may be a longer but easier route.
James Joyce’s line of Ulysses could make sense for Irish importers, exporters and truckers in this new post-Brexit world: “The longest way is the shortest way home.”
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