Martin Cullen (Waterford, Fianna Fail)

Good Food Ireland has received significant support in recent years. For example, representatives have travelled to the various destinations with the Volvo Around the World Race, where I understand they enjoyed enormous success, with funding from Fáilte Ireland and Tourism Ireland. I attended a dinner last night at which some 300 foreign travel groupings were represented and some 280 from the island. Everybody was blown away by the quality of the food and by the presentation made by Good Food Ireland. I agree with the Deputy that it is important to continue to improve the image of Ireland in terms of the quality of food now available. That product development has been led from the front and a huge internationalisation effort has taken place in the past 12 months which is strongly supported by the agencies. The feedback I am receiving from people who have visited target countries is that the campaign has worked extremely well.

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