Ireland & the Single Market post Brexit

The population of the island is growing. I expect in my lifetime that it will finally recover to and exceed the pre-famine level.

Already at ca. 6.75 million it's not an insignificant market anymore. Most of its citizens also have higher levels of disposable income than the EU average.

You can be sure Amazon isn't building a .ie site on a whim. They will have carefully analysed this and had contingency plans in place based on what Brexit turned out to be.

Other retailers are slower than Amazon but they will come to the same conclusion: too much lost revenue to ignore the Irish market these days. I reckon the value of sales to Ireland from their .co.uk business were per capita much higher than sales to GB.

We might even see some really unexpected stuff like Sainsbury's looking to expand island wide to help make up for some of the damage to their home market. It's well known that M&S' most profitable stores are in the Republic.

Indeed but I suspect M&S staff in Irish stores are paid more than their colleagues in the UK. Rates, insurance, etc. are all probably more expensive.

Ireland is a higher cost economy but it's better to be that than scraping along the bottom.

Eric Cartman wrote: »

While you are correct I don't necessarily think its better. these costs mean we have exponentially higher costs for housing, food etc..

a poor working person in England is better off than one here even with less money.

I'm not sure.
I've seen how both live and its really 50/50. Poor people in the UK can shop and go for a pint but can only do it in spoons and the £1 shop and will be priced out of not only the majority of their own high street but will have to watch their kids enter a massively unequal education system which will stigmatize them for years.
Healthcare is the one area where I would happily swap the UK system for ours

In Holyhead, traffic has fallen 50% as hauliers stymied by Brexit find their way from Ireland to France without entering the UK
Red tape has also affected Fishguard, another of Stena Line’s ports. Freight from southern Ireland would previously have arrived here from Rosslare, but traffic has been down on average 50% since January.
“There was great fear in the Irish haulage industry that Dover-Calais would be a bottleneck. A lot of them are saying [sailing from Ireland to France] is not the most efficient way – it is more costly – but currently they are prepared to pay that premium.”

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/feb/20/ports-feel-the-chill-as-trade-re-routes-around-brexit-britain

zell12 wrote: »

When will consumers see price increases due to longer journey times from continent?

That graphic is out of date. The "via the landbridge" label should read "up to 150 hours". Brexit is done, the Landbridge is now more of an obstacle course than a bridge - what's the point of referring to obsolete data, especially with dumbed-down tags such as less than and up to?

Graphic from TheJournal.ie - Tonnes of new ferry routes have helped to Brexit-proof Irish trade - but choppy waters could yet be ahead

Around half of Ireland’s exports to countries other than the UK, and almost 150,000 trucks, travelled over the UK landbridge each year before Brexit. That rate of traffic has now been halved, and is being diverted around the UK on ferries going directly to the EU.

Not everyone knows the ins and outs of our changing trade routes. I did not know that landbridge had gone down 50% from 150k trucks per annum. It was just an article.

Zell12 raises a good point.

The reason so much traffic went by the landbridge route up to now in the past is that it was the quickest and cheapest route. It no longer is, which is why traffic has diverted to the direct sea routes. And a good job has been done in terms of forseeing this shift, facilitating it and gearing up to meet demand. The UK could learn a thing or two about planning for Brexit by looking at this.

But.

It remains the case that the geared up, facilitated, direct sea routes are not as quick, and not as cheap, as the landbridge used to be. So that's some degree of extra time cost, and some degree of extra monetary cost, permanently imposed on the trade that used to avail of the landbridge. We can't magic that away. And "will it lead to price rises?" is a perfectly reasonable and realistic question to ask.

An obvious question is how much extra delay, and how much extra expense will be imposed? I haven't seen an attempt at a systematic answer to this question, though I'm sure it will have been studied and modelled. As for the impact of the extra delay and expense, that's going to vary depending on the nature of the trade. For some business - exporting fresh shellfish, say - even a few hours additional journey time can be a signficant problem. There'll be other businesses - trading in high-volume low-margin goods, for example - in which the additional transport costs will significantly eat into margins that are already thin. And there'll be still other businesses in which transporting product is a minor expense, and the extra cost and delay is easily absorbed.

So I don't think there's a simple one-size-fits-all answer to the question "what kind of price increases will we see and when will we see them?" But it's a good question to ask.

First Up wrote: »

Correct. Brexit was always going to have negative consequences and this was one of the most obvious. Transport operators and others in the supply chain are adapting as much as possible but it is unrealistic to expect no damage to time critical sectors.

But we can make some of it up in other ways - especially by taking some of the business the UK is losing.

At the national level, yes. But that the level of the individual business or individual trader or individual customer, there will be Brexit losses and costs for some, and they will have limited or no oppportunity to make these up by taking up business that the UK is losing. Others will take up that business.

It’s lorries coming back empty that seems to be the biggest issue. We export more than we import from the EU. But surely every lorry coming from France should be able to find some goods and produce to bring back? Especially with no paperwork or tarriffs etc between us.
Surely there is an opening there to supply goods from the continent to the U.K. via the NI back door for Irish hauliers . If the U.K. starts imposing more stringent checks.

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Cork - Roscoff is just under 12 hours.

The much longer Dublin - Rotterdam is 30 hours.

Roscoff is further from Netherlands/ Germany than London or Calais. 12 hour sailing and your still hundreds of miles from the heart of Europe. It’s nearly as far to the west as Cornwall in England.
More suitable if your heading for south of France or Spain.