Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The only thing I do not like about the charts in the annual report, and I ask the Department to take this into account for next year's report, is when the Department comes to the exports on page 9, the chart shows the volume of exports going up from 1 million tonnes to 7 million tonnes in gaps of 1 million tonnes, but when I go to the next page the chart goes up in gaps of 2 million from zero to 14 million. When one looks at those charts, they look kind of similar but the right hand figures have been shrunk to make them look different. That might not have been the intention but the same method should have been used on both charts because those two charts are not comparable unless the reader understands that the gaps on the right-hand side should be twice the height of the gaps on the left-hand side.

The presentation is not helpful. We have to go through it to see the amount on the right-hand side, where the gaps are different. That is one of the issues I wanted to raise. I do not know if it has been discussed much in Ireland. We knew we were importing quite an amount of food, because we see it on our supermarket shelves, but I thought we were exporting more than double of what we were importing. It now transpires that it is the other way around. We will come to the price and the monetary value in due course.

I refer to prepared consumer foods. The Department's chart states that the prepared consumer foods sector, which is obviously the convenience-type foods many people want, accounted for more than €2.6 billion in agrifood sector exports in 2018, and €3.6 billion in imports. Ireland is importing far more prepared consumer foods for consumption than we are exporting. All the witnesses know this because they are in the Department but the public will be surprised to know we import much more prepared consumer foods than we export. We import much more agrifood products than we export. Is that an accurate reading of the Department's figures?