European Union legislation provides for a set of harmonised rules to ensure that food and feed are safe, and to ensure a high level of human, animal and plant health, as well as animal welfare along the agrifood chain. Primary responsibility for ensuring that the obligations set out in Union legislation are met rests with operators. The official controls regulation is clear that the responsibility to enforce Union agrifood chain legislation lies with member states, whose competent authorities monitor and verify, through the implementation of official controls, that relevant Union requirements are effectively complied with and enforced.
My Department is one such competent authority and other Departments and State agencies also have a role in this regard. My Department will continue to meet its obligations in respect of the official controls regulation, irrespective of Brexit. From 1 January 2021, obligations to carry out official controls will continue to apply equally across all EU member states, including in respect of the need to carry out sanitary and phytosanitary checks on imports of animals and goods from all third countries, including Great Britain. In this regard, my Department has invested significantly in staffing, IT and infrastructure to ensure that it is able to continue to efficiently carry out the official controls on goods entering Ireland from Great Britain after the end of the transition period.
In simple terms, animal health, animal husbandry and processing standards are applicable throughout the country and the EU, and they will continue in full after Brexit. Our requirements do not change. What changes is the fact Britain becomes a third country, so the amount of those checks and balances we have to put in place will be greatly enhanced because of our very significant trade with Great Britain. It makes it all the more important to, hopefully, get a trade deal over the line in the next couple of days. While we would prefer it was not so late, we have all of our preparations in place to account for every eventuality. Irrespective of what happens in the coming days and weeks, there will be disruption and change on 1 January in terms of the role Great Britain will play as a trading partner.