Pippa Hackett (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The labour issue is going to continue to be a problem, and I ask myself where it will end. We are spiralling towards a race to the bottom and we have to get off that track. That is in supporting local food producers.

Many wonderful local food producers operate off a handful of acres, maybe employing five or six people supplying a small town with quite a significant number of horticultural projects and making a good living out of it. Therefore, it can be done. It is small scale. I suppose we very much focused on the retail side, the larger commercial growers and the supports tended to go that way, which is fine, but we end up with that conundrum. However, we also need to support people to grow for retail. That may drive us down the road whereby we are always looking for cheaper labour, always struggling with the price at the till. We need to look to other routes to market. Connecting with local growers is the way to go.

See this speech in context