Food hygiene standards that are being circulated to 45,000 food businesses in Ireland have also been published in Chinese and Polish and there are plans to publish them in Russian, it emerged yesterday.
Maurice Buckley, chief executive of the National Standards Authority, said that as a large number of people employed in the food industry are not native English speakers, the standards on hygiene in the catering industry were being published in Polish and Mandarin Chinese.
He said if there was a further strong demand for these foreign language versions, especially from the catering sector, it was planned to publish the document involved, IS 34O, in Russian and to publish all documents in the three other languages, as well as Irish and English.
Formally launching the publications in Dublin Castle yesterday, the Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture and Food, Trevor Sargent, said 300,000 people were directly employed in the food sector here and there were 45,000 registered food businesses.
He said the value of the grocery market to the Irish economy was €12 billion and convenience food retailing now accounted for 7.5 per cent of that market.
Tourism was Ireland's largest indigenous industry, contributing €5.9 billion to the economy, and there was a new trend in "culinary tourism", which was being promoted by Bord Fáilte.
EU regulations required all food businesses to control food safety hazards in the way specified in the publications, which had been simplified for the industry to understand what had to be done to meet those standards, Mr Sargent said.