Gerard O’Hare’s phoneline has been busy. As general manager of Beagan’s, the country’s largest independent customs broker, he and his staff have been taking up to 20 queries a day from callers concerned about Brexit.
“The state of unreadiness among people out there is just unbelievable,” says the customs man who has been in the business long enough to remember trucks waiting a day at the Irish Border for customs clearance.
“A lot of the small companies are just hoping that the whole thing will go away and a lot of the bigger companies, while they are thinking the same thing, are trying to make some plans.”
When the Revenue Commissioners warned last month that the number of customs declaration forms filed a year could surge from almost 1.7 million to 20 million after the UK leaves the European Union, O’Hare was listening. He and brokers like him will, for the most part, be the ones helping traders to prepare the declarations.
“My personal opinion is that there will be a Brexit but it cannot be on the 29th of March. The proposed system in both the UK and Ireland will not work and will not be able to function with the volume of transactions that happen.”
Without a simplified customs procedure post-Brexit and some kind of “trusted trader” system to facilitate immediate customs clearance for goods on arrival into or exit from the country, he predicts chaos.
