Róisín Garvey (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

It is great to hear that the witnesses are supporting the Town Centre First initiative, as well as the digihubs. If they are dealing with local authorities on this matter, can they please make sure the digihubs are not located in an industrial estate 2 km or 3 km outside the town, which most people would have to drive to? I have unfortunately seen that quite recently. I will not name the place but I decided to use this town's digihub as a meeting room, in order to support it, and it was 2 km outside the town. It works well in Ennistymon, for example, where it is right in the heart of the town, which is brilliant. It is not as if we do not have empty buildings in town centres. We will not even go there. If the witnesses have influence with local authorities, can they make sure the digihubs are not put outside the towns? We want to bring things into towns, as the witnesses all know. That is just one thing I wanted to flag. Maybe they could learn from the mistake made with the particular digihub I mentioned.

Having worked with organic food and lots of producers, I know about producing food. We still have issues around the branding of Irish food and how it can stand out from food imported from other EU countries or non-EU countries. I have fallen foul of this myself and have bought things like rashers or cheese as I was convinced through the labelling that they were Irish products. I was raised to buy Irish where at all possible and it is getting more competitive now. The price of quality food and organic food has come down so it is becoming more affordable as we increase food production but the branding can be quite deceptive and it can be hard to distinguish. Is there anything we can do about that? I know there are EU regulations and so on. I just wanted to flag that as an issue if we are serious about supporting indigenous food producers. The Minister of State, Senator Hackett, launched a grant last week to help with food packaging, which is good, but we need to support the indigenous food sector. It has not been mentioned yet here today. We talk about carbon footprints, and of course it depends on how the food is produced, but we are producing very little food in Ireland and we import an awful lot. We bring in 80,000 tonnes of spuds from England and 30,000 tonnes of seed potatoes from Scotland every year. If we are serious about indigenous jobs, there is huge potential for jobs in the food sector. I know some organic growers who have created lots of jobs on their small family farms through producing good-quality food.

The supports for the digitalisation of equipment are good. However, there is other equipment that does not need to be digitalised but just upgraded, and that can be quite costly. Going back to the capital grant, sometimes people just need help with capital funding to improve their old equipment. That will enable them to increase their employee numbers. Unfortunately, it is not all about digitalisation, especially in the food sector.

The witnesses are doing great work but we are under pressure. There is a climate emergency and we need to get this country to become resilient in so many different ways. With the loss of biodiversity, we will not be producing food any more. It is huge, so I will try to push the witnesses on it, unfortunately. I have emailed both organisations to arrange meetings. I will be meeting Enterprise Ireland's climate group, as well as Mr. McElwee about the lean and the micro and what else we can do. This is something I am passionate about and I look forward to working with the witnesses on it.