Jim Power

There's 109,000 people working directly in agriculture.

But there's foreign direct investment in rural Ireland.

There's tourism in rural Ireland.

There's retail.

There's construction.

There's a lot of small businesses around rural Ireland.

So...

There is a lot of other economic activity besides farming happening.

But I also think, and I'm interested in your view on this, to me, there are two lessons that should be learned from the most recent crisis, the ongoing crisis in Iran.

One is energy security, and we've spoken about that many times.

But the second is food security.

um you know if if you look at um supply chains for food and for example ireland imports 83 percent of the fruit and veg that it actually consumes i think that's mad um but on the other hand it does export 19 billion in food and beverage a lot of that dominated by dairy and beef but um

You know, you need, particularly in the very uncertain times we live in now, which is not going to change, food security is really important.

So do you think it's worth subsidising farmers to produce food?

Okay.

Yeah.

I'm going to check out the stats.

I've actually seen them in the past, but they won't come to mind off the top of my head.

Just to wrap up, Chris, yeah, the US payroll, sorry, UK payroll numbers are just out.

Sharp decline in UK payrolls in March, suggesting we're starting to see the first impact of the Iranian crisis.