Mr. Con Traas:

I will respond briefly to the question about labelling. I do not have a good answer to it but I can see why labelling is very difficult. Taking the example of wild Irish salmon and Irish wild salmon, they are two totally different things, but most people will not know that, so the committee can see where this is fraught with difficulty and that to legislate for it is really difficult.

I wish to bounce back on something Dr. Moran said. The last good environmental scheme we had was REPS. We have not had one since and the rest were not well designed.

As to why horticulture is struggling, apples is reflective of this. They peaked in the early 1970s in terms of crop production area and so on. That was partly because we joined what turned out to be the European Union and it was just so much cheaper and so much simpler to get stuff from abroad. People stopped growing things at home because it was cheaper to buy them from abroad than it was to grow them at home. We, therefore, lost many people who were growing themselves. All the small-scale market gardeners went. It was not that they went all of a sudden; rather, some got older and retired. There was no succession so the farm probably went into one of the mainstream types of farming and so on. That happened over the subsequent 30 or 40 years.

Horticulture is still in quite a good position. There is 18,000 ha of land dedicated to horticulture. It is still the fourth largest sector of agriculture in the country. However, these are problems that growers are discussing. Members can see we still import a lot of potatoes, but the types of potatoes we are importing are frozen chips. We do not have a frozen chip processing plant here, and that is just to do with the industrial scale of producing frozen chips. Those are the kinds of issues there are.

Deputy Whitmore mentioned apples from New Zealand. Bringing apples from New Zealand, which is fairly carbon-intensive, is not much more carbon-intensive than bringing them by road from Italy to Ireland, for example. When one starts digging into the particulars of various types of fruits, vegetables or whatever it is one is moving, it becomes very difficult for people to ever understand what is good and what is bad. We have a kind of hunch that things from farther away are worse and things from closer are better, but it is a lot more complicated than that. Obviously, one should never fly any fruit or vegetables anywhere, but a lot of it is not flown. Much of it is transported in large quantities by ship, where it is chilled. It would have to be chilled even if it were sitting here in Ireland. It is, therefore, very difficult for an ordinary consumer to get to grips with what is sustainable and what is not. I would not know where to start with it, but of course we should have more domestic production. That should not be difficult, but what comes with that is a certain level of understanding of seasonality. We do not grow strawberries here for the middle of winter or tomatoes, for that matter. It is just not possible. I like tomatoes and I will have them later in the year as well, unfortunately. It is difficult but at a certain point, unless something like a carbon tax begins to impinge on the price of those products, I do not see that all the labelling in the world will achieve what a simple system of making sure that the carbon price, the carbon attached to a product, will achieve, unfortunately.