Ms Tara McCarthy:

I thank Deputy Carthy for his questions. I will start with the question on horticulture. Our team has been engaged with the horticulture industry on that matter and we can follow up with the Deputy on any detail specific to that. It is clearly a huge challenge for the horticulture industry and it is looking to map its way through it. There is no obvious solution from the perspective of a replacement product, and there is a quality challenge if peat has to be imported or if a substitute for it must be found. A paper has been created on that with the industry and this has been shared with the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. This paper has been discussed by our board and at the horticulture forum. We are looking, in partnership with the industry, to try to navigate towards the solutions to that. However, I would not underestimate the challenge of that either.

That was a fair question on the European-specific exports and why that research is only being launched now. We have been doing lots of other things and we are being very transparent on what we do, when we do it and why we are doing it. The first piece of work we have been focusing on, especially at the prepared foods industry, has been to look at its capacity first and its prioritisation. We have looked at a significant lead generation opportunity for those industries as well and the Deputy would have seen detail of that in the Committee of Public Accounts. Then we were looking at the broader picture to see if we were missing a trick. This was the further sense check we did with industry to try to navigate who exactly is engaging with the British product. As it is becoming more and more obvious that the negative scenario may be a more evident solution, we are looking to see if there is any stone we can turn within that. In the past two sessions, Senator Paul Daly has been consistently asking us to find the opportunity in Brexit as much as the negativity, and that is exactly what that research is about. The timing of it is related to the resources available to us but we would always challenge ourselves to do more faster, bigger and better. That is why we are transparent on when we do everything.

I will bring Mr. Brennan in on the PGIs.