‘It is a nonsense’ - how Brexit disrupted Jewish food supplies to Ireland

Supermarket operator Jim Treacy estimates that he lost between €200,000 and €300,000 a year in sales when post-Brexit checks required on British food imports put an end to his kosher food aisle.

For 30 years, the owner of the busy SuperValu outlet in Churchtown, south Dublin, worked with and supplied the Jewish community in the city with kosher food products.

The term kosher describes food – and the restaurants where it is served – that adheres to Jewish dietary law, covering everything from the method of how the animal is slaughtered in meat production to how the food is prepared, ensuring that milk and meat products are kept separate.

Due to Brexit, the food products meeting those rules were faced with stringent rules of another kind.

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EU checks on food products of animal origin were applied on food products arriving into the State from Britain from January of 2021, when the UK’s departure from the EU came into effect.

The UK becoming a “third country” to Brussels for trade purposes means Irish importers have to comply with vast amounts of red tape on kosher food. A decades-long supply chain that had been free of paperwork as it crossed the Irish Sea from wholesalers in Manchester suddenly faced a wall of forms as imports traversed the new EU-UK trade border.

Brexit and the border controls arising from it changed everything for that supply line, ending the flow of chilled deli meats that were popular with Jewish customers in Dublin.

Chicken, cheese and tinned food were among the popular items bought in Churchtown by the Jewish community, many of whom live nearby in the south Dublin suburbs such as Rathgar, Terenure and Milltown. Other customers included Jewish people and Israeli nationals in Ireland working with big multinationals such as Intel.

‘Rigmarole’

“You will not find a haulier or logistics person who will take the product from Manchester and go through all the red tape and rigmarole to get it into Ireland,” says Mr Treacy.

“We tried for months on end in conjunction with working with the Jewish community and their representatives but we just couldn’t find a way around it.”

The complexity of the products supplied and the consignment size were the problem. No one was willing to take on such a bureaucratic headache for such a small amount of business.

Mr Treacy says the consignments were “not like one pallet of one product” but “70 different items” on a single pallet, with each of them requiring its own paperwork.

“You can see where the problem is from a form-filling exercise; no haulier or logistics person is going to go through all that paperwork. We couldn’t find anybody to do it,” he says.

Instead, the community themselves have become retailers. They found alternatives to their traditional British suppliers, sourcing kosher food from France, the Netherlands and other EU countries.

A click-and-collect retail outlet called An Siopa Kosher was set up inside the synagogue in Terenure to co-ordinate orders and distribute kosher food once sold by SuperValu. It was a practical solution that worked but it came at a cost.

“Brexit has changed the pattern of purchasing kosher food for the Irish community and has made it more expensive and impossible to purchase from the UK due to the regulations imposed on the small suppliers and producers,” says Maurice Cohen, chairman of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland.

Ireland’s Jewish community is small, numbering 2,557 in the 2016 census, of whom 1,439 lived in Dublin. Not all would be observant Jews eating kosher food exclusively, so the total population and potential market for kosher food are not the same.

Northern Ireland

In Northern Ireland, the problem is more acute for the much smaller Jewish community living mostly in and around Belfast, where the number of people eating kosher food is in the dozens.

Last year, Reverend David Kale, a minister in Belfast’s Jewish community, said he feared the EU ban on chilled meat imports would “cause the community to completely die”.

The challenge posed by Brexit to the kosher food supply into Northern Ireland was raised by UK prime minister Boris Johnson when he visited earlier this month. At a private gathering of Conservatives in a Belfast hotel, Johnson relayed the difficulties the community has been experiencing in sourcing kosher food from Britain after he met a representative of the community.

Johnson used it as another example of why the Northern Ireland protocol, the part of the 2019 EU-UK divorce deal that he himself signed to “get Brexit done”, was not working. The UK government is threatening to take unilateral action to dismantle parts of the agreement.

Members of the Jewish community acknowledge that theirs is a minor problem in the overall chaos caused by Brexit and some privately concede their problem is being used as a political football by the British government with statements such as Johnson’s. But the post-Brexit trade rules still pose real difficulties for a community simply trying to observe the laws of their religion.

Michael Black, chairman of the Jewish community in Belfast, says they have maintained a supply of kosher food thanks to support from the UK government, the grace period on food import checks and a “willing supplier going the extra mile” to continue the imports from England.

“We don’t like to bother these people too much, so we try and bulk up. We are managing to get a limited amount of product across so we are not starving,” says Mr Black.

Any processed meats, such as a sausage, burgers or vacuum-packed meat, which a lot of the community ate, still cannot be imported but they can source chicken and beef.

“It is an effort and obviously there is a cost involved,” he says.

‘Not a viable market’

Mr Black says the Belfast community numbers about 65 people, most of whom are in their 70s and older, including some who live in care centres. He estimates that the community’s annual spend on kosher food is about £20,000 (€24,000), which is “not a viable market for anybody”.

Like many others in Northern Ireland, there is the option to switch from east-west trade to north-south but for an elderly population in Belfast, jumping in the car to the synagogue shop in Dublin every time you need to stock up on your kosher food supply is just not an option.

“For me to drive down to Dublin every time you need something is another added cost. As a last resort, you could go to Dublin. Going forward, it is not a solution,” says Mr Black.

He says that without the grace period, the Jewish community in Belfast would not be able to source any kosher food products from England under the post-Brexit regulations. The cost of the required veterinary certificates for each slaughtered animal alone would be prohibitive.

Meanwhile, EU rules on plant imports meant the Belfast community could not bring in the Arba’ah Minim, the four plants mentioned in the Torah used to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, from their usual sources in England. The community in Dublin helped their counterparts in Belfast find another supplier and arranged to have the plants shipped through the Republic.

Mr Black says the community has sought flexibility from Brussels but the EU has argued back that it cannot make an exception because it has to protect the integrity of its single market.

“We pointed out to them that they did it for the pharmaceutical industry,” says Mr Black, referring to the EU’s move in December to allow medicines to be supplied to Northern Ireland from Britain without EU regulatory processes being applied to them.

“They just batted that away,” he says.

He feels they are a tiny community “caught up in the bigger picture”.

‘Nonsense’

“It is a nonsense. We are not a threat to the food chain in Europe. We are small, small community. The foods are going nowhere except into our freezers,” he says.

In the Dublin community, Maurice Cohen hopes a solution can be found in Belfast.

“We do hope that the politicians will somehow be able to sort out the small Jewish community in Northern Ireland to make sure that they can continue to practise their religion and eat kosher food, which has been the norm for thousands of years,” he says.

At SuperValu Churchtown, Mr Treacy regrets the trade lost from his Jewish customers, a business he built up over three decades.

“I would rather it wouldn’t have happened, but what could you do? They knew we had exhausted all the avenues,” he says.

With an air of frustration, he dismisses the chaos brought by Brexit as “a mess”.

“It’s a crazy situation, the whole Brexit thing,” he says.