Ireland & the Single Market post Brexit

fly_agaric

Datacore wrote: »

It’s a mixture of necessity and blinkers.

The government did a fair bit, but many companies likely didn’t engage as much as they could have. There’s been a thread of “it will all sort itself out” running though it for years.

I really don’t think anyone thought it would be as stark as this, rather more of a soft adjustment, which was what last year should have been, but without a clear plan based on an agreement, that was left until the last minute by many.

I thought all along there was a bit of that from the Irish government (the British cannot be that mad, they will see sense sooner or later).
edit: So some blinkers on in that sense I suppose, but they did appreciate Brexit itself is a very bad idea and an awful pain in the arse for Ireland + needed to be planned for and mitigated.

In fairness the government were actually correct in the end (given I expected no agreement with the EU at all...which would have been much worse) but it was very, very late in the day coming and the final outcome is very much a "hard" Brexit as described originally, with main saving grace that Ireland can safely ignore the NI land border (for now).

However Irish businesses should have known that no agreement could ever replace Single Market/Custom Union membership & it was all going to kick in from 1/1 given the UK had rejected an EU/UK transition period extension early last year + afaik we as an EU member cannot unilaterally decide to "phase in" Customs controls to suit businesses here better/give them more time to get ready.

PommieBast

BorneTobyWilde wrote: »

If UK had a referendum tomorrow to join EU it would win 70% 30% , reality has slapped the fishermen and businesses in the face.
If Labour should be running on the promise to rejoin, now that reality has hit.

Doubt it. The same vested interests would use the same channels to push the same message to the same audience. Most Brexiteers would just scream Fake News.

Labour have always been spineless on Europe.

Datacore

They’re not spineless, rather half of them are Brexiteers.

Remember U.K. Labour is a very very broad organisation. It would be like trying to put the Irish left from the spectrum of somewhere on the left/progressive fringes of FF and FG, to Sinn Fein to Labour, to the Soc Dems, to Solidarity–People Before Profit and various other groups all under a single brand and leadership.

It’s what the two party system tends to do. The USA is same, albeit with a centre that’s much further right.

View

CelticRambler wrote: »

Considering they - the UK - didn't know what kind of Brexit they wanted until about a month ago, I'd say it was a perfectly sensible level of development. Are there queues of lorries up the N11 as far as Wexford? If not, then it'd be fair to say that Roslare is currently coping better than Dover or Folkestone/Eurotunnel with their vastly greater capacity.

Mrs May outlined the kind of Brexit that they were going for back in 2017. That was an extreme maximum distance type of Brexit, so there is absolutely no excuse for massively better infrastructure not being ready.

View

BorneTobyWilde wrote: »

If UK had a referendum tomorrow to join EU it would win 70% 30% , reality has slapped the fishermen and businesses in the face.
If Labour should be running on the promise to rejoin, now that reality has hit.

It almost certainly wouldn’t be a result like that. Both major parties have been telling the electorate that Brexit is wonderful for the past four and a half years, and most people haven’t been impacted directly by it.

Datacore

The only EU an element of English politics would be a member of odd one that it ran. It’s as simple as that. They’re not able to see themselves as equal members of anything.

They’re not equal members within the U.K. - It’s very much a case of the supreme country and the other countries that are dragged along. It’s never been federal or a Union of equals.

Subtle little hints like The Bank of England, never the Bank of the U.K. Or that the Westminster parliament is basically the English parliament with Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs added. It was never morphed into a proper federal system.

It’s not all of England and I think it’s unfair to say “the English”. It’s a rump of the Tory Party and English nationalists.

I think you can forget any prospect of the U.K. rejoining. I’m also not convinced that the EU would even be that welcoming to them after all this. They need to remain out for a long while before that could ever be undone. They really badly messed us around, and during a pandemic!!

Pablo Escobar

BorneTobyWilde wrote: »

If UK had a referendum tomorrow to join EU it would win 70% 30% , reality has slapped the fishermen and businesses in the face.
If Labour should be running on the promise to rejoin, now that reality has hit.

I'm not sure it's in the medium or long-term interests of the EU. The nationalistic cancer is far too prevalent and would lead to further issues very quickly. The UK needs to be purged, something which will take years. Only then would allowing them to re-join be prudent.

View

Datacore wrote: »

They’re not spineless, rather half of them are Brexiteers.

Remember U.K. Labour is a very very broad organisation. It would be like trying to put the Irish left from the spectrum of somewhere on the left/progressive fringes of FF and FG, to Sinn Fein to Labour, to the Soc Dems, to Solidarity–People Before Profit and various other groups all under a single brand and leadership.

It’s what the two party system tends to do. The USA is same, albeit with a centre that’s much further right.

Most of the mainstream socialist//social democratic parties in the EU are also broad organisations without being (their domestic versions of) Brexiters.

It is only hard left/Communist parties that tend to be hostile to the EU and even within them there has always been a strong pro-EU Eurocommunist tradition.

The reality is that the (British) Labour Party has been “captured” by hard left infiltrators just as the Conservative party has been “captured” by hard right infiltrators. Both of them have seen their membership plummet from the days of them being mass membership organisations which makes them prone to “capture” by hardline factions (a problem not unique to the U.K.).

fash

Datacore wrote: »

Brexit just seems to be delivering no upsides really at all.

There are lots of upsides- Johnson got what he wanted: power; the Tories got what they wanted: the sidelining of the Brexit party and unity within the party - what more could anyone want?

An Ciarraioch

It's only when you see actual pictures that one realises the volumes imported each week:

https://twitter.com/StenaLine/status/1350543832237158401

andrewfaulk

Nody wrote: »

There are two issues of note; first of all UK export trucks used to run about 80% empty before Brexit. This meant that you could basically get transport for as close to free as you can get because the truck companies wanted and would take anything out simply to have someone pay for the fuel for the return leg (assuming you did not want to go all the way to Ukraine or similar). Second part is time; you can cut transit time via land bridge vs. ferry (which was what made it popular) transit time.

Now the above was before December and did not take into account covid tests, Kent permits and all that fun stuff. Today I'd guess (I'm not involved in transport directly any more) it's cheaper to take the ferry simply because the waiting times (and then related surcharges from the truck companies) will drive the land bridge cost way up.

Container on a LO/LO ship is generally cheapest, then land bridge and then direct.. But land bridge is messy at the moment and there is a good bit of work in going customs docs.. plus your driver could be stuck in the U.K. for a few days, no way to say for certain but does need to be considered..

Of course the other issue is that Verona has put in peoples heads that RO/RO on a ferry is the only way to move freight and drowned out the freight spokespeople who actually know about all the options.. lo/lo container options to the EU have grown massively in the past 3 years

andrewfaulk

CelticRambler wrote: »

Yes, but do they know that and are they doing it? Or are they sticking all their non-GB-made products into a parcel, making a vague, inaccurate declaration on the CN22/23 form and sending it through the post as if nothing has changed?

Trading B2B doesn’t use CN22 or CN23 forms..

An Ciarraioch

andrewfaulk wrote: »

Container on a LO/LO ship is generally cheapest, then land bridge and then direct.. But land bridge is messy at the moment and there is a good bit of work in going customs docs.. plus your driver could be stuck in the U.K. for a few days, no way to say for certain but does need to be considered..

Of course the other issue is that Verona has put in peoples heads that RO/RO on a ferry is the only way to move freight and drowned out the freight spokespeople who actually know about all the options.. lo/lo container options to the EU have grown massively in the past 3 years

Almost as if someone had read this post, news of a container service between Dublin and Amsterdam, with the potential of expanding to other Irish ports:

https://twitter.com/IrelandinNL/status/1351112951525216266

Holland is one of the leading producers of fruit and veg per capita, so should be no shortages on that score:

https://t.co/XLQ3WZNsEZ?amp=1

Sam Russell

An Ciarraioch wrote: »

Almost as if someone had read this post, news of a container service between Dublin and Amsterdam.

Holland is one of the leading producers of fruit and veg per capita, so should be no shortages on that score:

https://t.co/XLQ3WZNsEZ?amp=1

Does fruit and veg come in by container?

We should be growing our own fruit and veg - well not bananas or oranges, but plenty of veg.

completedit

Sam Russell wrote: »

Does fruit and veg come in by container?

We should be growing our own fruit and veg - well not bananas or oranges, but plenty of veg.

The world of international trade isn't that simple.

Datacore

Ideally, Ireland should be doing the things that Ireland can do best and most efficiently and that really is not growing fruit in a relatively cold culminate, under glass.

That’s a huge part of being in a big single market. You benefit from the economies of scale, the specialisation opportunities and the ability to access huge shared resources and services.

We are going to have to dive head first into Europe in a far deeper and more independent way than at have done to date.

We’ve the advantage of being small and nimble and we need to use it.

Sam Russell

Datacore wrote: »

Ideally, Ireland should be doing the things that Ireland can do best and most efficiently and that really is not growing fruit in a relatively cold culminate, under glass.

That’s a huge part of being in a big single market. You benefit from the economies of scale, the specialisation opportunities and the ability to access huge shared resources and services.

We are going to have to dive head first into Europe in a far deeper and more independent way than at have done to date.

We’ve the advantage of being small and nimble and we need to use it.

Well, our climate is well suited to growing sugar beet, which made us self sufficient in sugar. That was removed by some dodgy deal with the EU. Maybe we should go back to that. We should grow more spuds - I do not understand why we don't.

Poly tunnels would expand our range of vegetables and would be far more profitable than suckler beef. We sell grass fed premium beef at commodity prices into the UK - daft. It would also provide much needed rural employment.

We need to be smarter at what we do and be more self sufficient.

Hurrache

Sam Russell wrote: »

We need to be smarter at what we do and be more self sufficient.

We couldn't really be more self sufficient, we're the most food secure country in the world as recently as a couple of years ago. Not sure how much that has changed.

completedit

Sam Russell wrote: »

Well, our climate is well suited to growing sugar beet, which made us self sufficient in sugar. That was removed by some dodgy deal with the EU. Maybe we should go back to that. We should grow more spuds - I do not understand why we don't.

Poly tunnels would expand our range of vegetables and would be far more profitable than suckler beef. We sell grass fed premium beef at commodity prices into the UK - daft. It would also provide much needed rural employment.

We need to be smarter at what we do and be more self sufficient.

We are part of an integrated political and economic union. At this stage, you can really only talk about European self sufficiency, not Irish specific. Also its a beggar thy neighbour dilemma. If Ireland goes down that road why not our export partners? Where does that leave us then? If you believe international trade to be a good thing, which it is on the aggregate from a purely economic point of view, then there's really no logic for Ireland producing certain foodstuffs on any sort of scale.

Sam Russell

Hurrache wrote: »

We couldn't really be more self sufficient, we're the most food secure country in the world as recently as a couple of years ago. Not sure how much that has changed.

Food security and being self sufficient are not the same thing.

We can live on our own home produced bacon and cabbage with a few spuds washed down with a glass of milk - that makes us food secure.

To be self sufficient, we need to supply our own seed potatoes, our own flour that come from the UK, and grow vegetables - like carrots and parsnips that currently come from Spain and the Netherlands, or peppers and tomatoes. If it can be grown in the Netherlands, it can grow here.

We were importing huge quantities of food from the UK, like ready meals, yoghurt (really - I thought we had our own?), cakes and biscuits, and stuff like that - factory produced processed unhealthy rubbish. We were even importing Irish cheese from the UK.

We should use Brexit as a way of resetting our way of life as well as our economy.

prawnsambo

completedit wrote: »

We are part of an integrated political and economic union. At this stage, you can really only talk about European self sufficiency, not Irish specific. Also its a beggar thy neighbour dilemma. If Ireland goes down that road why not our export partners? Where does that leave us then? If you believe international trade to be a good thing, which it is on the aggregate from a purely economic point of view, then there's really no logic for Ireland producing certain foodstuffs on any sort of scale.

We probably do need to grow more potatoes as Sam says, since we have been importing (mostly) from the UK to make up the balance. But that would require between 2,000 and 3,000 more hectares devoted to potato growing.

Sam Russell

prawnsambo wrote: »

We probably do need to grow more potatoes as Sam says, since we have been importing (mostly) from the UK to make up the balance. But that would require between 2,000 and 3,000 more hectares devoted to potato growing.

When it comes to hectares, we have plenty of them.

prawnsambo

Sam Russell wrote: »

When it comes to hectares, we have plenty of them.

But you do have to rotate crops, so it's probably more like four times that area needed. Definitely feasible though.

Datacore

Sam Russell wrote: »

Well, our climate is well suited to growing sugar beet, which made us self sufficient in sugar. That was removed by some dodgy deal with the EU. Maybe we should go back to that. We should grow more spuds - I do not understand why we don't.

Poly tunnels would expand our range of vegetables and would be far more profitable than suckler beef. We sell grass fed premium beef at commodity prices into the UK - daft. It would also provide much needed rural employment.

We need to be smarter at what we do and be more self sufficient.

A lot of those issues are more to do with choices being made by Irish agriculture. I agree we should be more diverse in production and that we are obsessed with beef / dairy farming, but that’s nothing to do with the EU single market. It’s lack of imagination locally.

We are also producing vast amounts of premium, grass fed milk that is for some daft reason ending up as unbranded milk powder.

We could do with going way up the value chain, rather than having an agricultural sector that seems to neither understand the concept of marketing a green, premium Irish product nor developing enough exportable brands.

My main argument in favour of that is it would be of big environmental benefit. If we went up the value chain we could produce less, sell it at a higher price & reap major benefits for areas like tourism though improving the sustainability of production. We could also prevent a lot of shocks caused caused by shifts in commodity prices.

What would the advantage to Ireland be of being self sufficient in sugar? It’s a cheap commodity item that relies on enormous economies of scale to be viable.
If you’re looking at state owned sugar companies processing beet, you’re sort of heading into odd old days of state enterprises that had no markets.


Our lack of imagination in terms of what we could do worth farming isn’t the EU’s fault. We could very easily just wander down a Brexit style blame everyone else type discussion on that, but we usually don’t.

Shut ourselves off and drown in milk, much as the U.K. is currently drowning in rotten fish?

grayzer75

Datacore wrote: »

We are also producing vast amounts of premium, grass fed milk that is for some daft reason ending up as unbranded milk powder.

It's not a daft reason at all, there is very high demand for that product all across the globe in milk powder form and also as an end product e.g. Abbott Nutrition infant formula. There's literally multiple container loads being shipped all over the world on a daily basis.

Datacore

And who makes the profit on that? The brand!
The value isn’t added at the milk production end. It’s added when you formulate it into a product and put it on a shelf.

The daft bit is we are chasing what are essentially commodities markets when we should have been developing global brands and leveraging our image.

Kerrygold’s success is something we should be doing a hell of a lot more of.

Obviously we have some success stories like Kerry Foods and so on, but we could be way higher up those ranks than we are.

It’s way off topic but, you’d expect Ireland to have a Danone, a Nestle or a Fonterra. We’re only beginning to get to that level in relatively recent years.

My point is that’s not about the EU single market being a threat. It’s that we’ve not done enough to leverage our position in Europe and globally to move up those value chains.

It’s an area that shows we over focused on FDI companies and didn’t grow our own brands in a way we really could have and are only recently realising.

Access to the EU markets should be giving us a huge market to develop products for and sell into.

A huge % of Irish food exports are unbranded commodity items and that does not compare well to say France or even the U.K.

If we are going to be a serious agrifood player that has to change. Otherwise we’re just primary producers.

My point is rather than bemoaning the loss of protectionism and coming up with reasons why the EU is somehow negative, we need to be using the huge market far more than we do.

The decoupling from the U.K. might perhaps serve as a wake up call too.

Sam Russell

Datacore wrote: »

What would the advantage to Ireland be of being self sufficient in sugar? It’s a cheap commodity item that relies on enormous economies of scale to be viable.
If you’re looking at state owned sugar companies processing beet, you’re sorts heading into odd old days of state enterprises that had no markets.

Sugar beet is a good fit for the Irish agriculture economy. It provide sufficient sugar for the Irish market as it used to do before sugar production was abandoned in 2006 following a reduction of EU sugar quotas - Irish Sugar (Greencore) took the compo route.

Also, it is a cash crop for the farmers with the by-product of sugar beet pulp which is a good feed supplement for cattle, thus reducing imported grain.

When it was in business, Irish Sugar provided freight traffic for Irish Rail, which provided jobs and revenue to IR.

All in all, it was a mistake to abandon sugar beet.

Datacore

If you look at the processes involved in sugar production, it’s entirely about economies of scale. It’s a process that’s not unlike running an oil refinery. It’s extremely energy intensive and the bigger the scale you can do it at, the higher the margin and more viable the business is. So smaller producers struggle to compete.

It was, for most of its existence, a state owned enterprise that was privatised and wasn’t doing very well. The fact that it supplied demand for fright to another state owned enterprise, Irish Rail is somewhat irrelevant surely?

I mean what you’re describing there is more like a Soviet command economy model.

How exactly would you propose self sufficiency? Ban supermarkets from stocking other cheaper sugars?

I mean sugar is probably one of the prime examples of an absolute commodity. It’s bought and sold by the ton on markets. It’s very low margin, with zero differentiation.

Had we grown a big, branded chocolate or confectionary brand on the back of it, perhaps? However we didn’t and we had a couple of relatively small scale sugar plants that were barely competitive.

Greencore did exactly that - spinning itself out of what was a big, low margin commodities business and growing a whole load of other product lines that are far more profitable.

The upside to being in a huge single market is market access, but you have to be prepared to compete and innovate.

prawnsambo

Datacore wrote: »

If you look at the processes involved in sugar production, it’s entirely about economies of scale. It’s a process that’s not unlike running an oil refinery. It’s extremely energy intensive and the bigger the scale you can do it at, the higher the margin and more viable the business is. So smaller producers struggle to compete.

It was, for most of its existence, a state owned enterprise that was privatised and wasn’t doing very well. The fact that it supplied demand for fright to another state owned enterprise, Irish Rail is somewhat irrelevant surely?

I mean what you’re describing there is more like a Soviet command economy model.

How exactly would you propose self sufficiency? Ban supermarkets from stocking other cheaper sugars?

I mean sugar is probably one of the prime examples of an absolute commodity. It’s bought and sold by the ton on markets. It’s very low margin, with zero differentiation.

Had we grown a big, branded chocolate or confectionary brand on the back of it, perhaps? However we didn’t and we had a couple of relatively small scale sugar plants that were barely competitive.

Greencore did exactly that - spinning itself out of what was a big, low margin commodities business and growing a whole load of other product lines that are far more profitable.

The upside to being in a huge single market is market access, but you have to be prepared to compete and innovate.

Yeah. I think in a situation like this, you need to assess what are viable and non-viable import substitutions. Particularly when looking at food imports from the UK. So on the face of it, increasing potato crops looks straightforward and relatively easy. But a lot depends on cost of entry, availability of suitable land and probably lots of other factors I haven't thought of.

Datacore

I definitely think we should be more diverse in agriculture and again it’s a marketing thing too to some degree.

There’s a demand for Irish vegetables in Ireland that often isn’t met and that’s about connecting with consumers about the quality and freshness of local products, if you can get them at reasonable cost and quality. We do have some ans it has been increasing, largely due to locavore demand.

It’s also about farming just being absolutely fixated on cows though and tillage is seen as too complex.

Even just speaking from point of view of the environmental impact, it might make a lot more sense to grow produce here where viable.

I think though we need to be taking to the EU and global markets with much better brand development. We have the ingredients, the talent and the environmental factors to do a lot more than we do.