Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein)
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I thank the witnesses for their contributions. They are singing to the choir here. When I was 19, I put up mushroom tunnels, grew mushrooms and worked in horticulture. I spent many years working with mushroom growers all through the west and down into the midlands, and in many of those cases, there was diversification on the farm. In probably two thirds of them, the women ran the mushroom enterprise, and ran it well, because they had the skills of organisation and bringing people together. They were also excellent at keeping the husbandry right, because you had to be careful with disease prevention and so on. That attention to detail was important. I am not saying the men among us here are sloppy but we have that tendency to not be as adherent to making sure everything is done absolutely perfectly. I found the women who ran those enterprises ran them exceedingly well and brought significant energy to it. They also proved themselves in their communities. It was very much a community thing because they needed to get people from their local community to come to help to pick the mushrooms, so they had all that too. I am well aware of the untapped potential within rural communities of women on farms who are not utilised to the full potential they could be.

Dr. Farrell made the very valid point that there are no women on the agriculture committee. I actually replaced a woman on the agriculture committee. Deputy Claire Kerrane, our TD for Roscommon-Galway, was the agriculture spokesperson for Sinn Féin. Only a couple of months ago, she stepped away from that role and I took over in agriculture again. It left a bit of a void there. I know Deputy Kerrane worked closely with all the farm organisations. She had a particular focus on women in farming because she grew up on a farm and understands and knows it.

I am interested in the issue of alternative or additional enterprises on the farm. I refer to the mushroom idea that was developed way back in the 1970s or 1980s. The idea was that there were small farms that were not really viable with what they were doing and an alternative or additional enterprise would be put on them that made the farm viable and futureproofed it. The problem with that industry was that it got more and more competitive, prices got tighter, things got tougher, labour got more expensive as society became more affluent, and only the big ones could survive. There are only a couple of dozen mushroom growers left in the country now. There were hundreds at that time, with three, four or five tunnels each. The ones that exist now are large growers with 50 tunnels. That is the only way they could survive. They had to get bigger and bigger and the small ones disappeared.

To be able to keep the farm alive was the idea. When developing on-farm enterprises like that which women can be central to, which I absolutely know, how do you do it in such a way that you do not run into that difficulty and you can make sure it is sustainable and viable in the long term? I see a vote has been called in the Dáil. It is probably the voting block and we will be away for a long time. Will the witnesses respond for a minute and then we will rush off?