Fruits and vegetables

Sir, – I buy fruits and vegetables every week. Of course I try to buy Irish whenever I can. While shopping in my local supermarket earlier this week, I was both surprised and disappointed to find how difficult it was to get any Irish fruits and vegetables. I did find the following: apples from Brazil, plums from Spain, easy-peeler oranges from South Africa, blueberries from Peru, raspberries from Portugal, grapes from Spain, cherries from Turkey, cherry tomatoes from Morocco, onions from New Zealand, scallions from Egypt, tomatoes from the Netherlands, bananas from Costa Rica, and kiwi fruits from New Zealand.

While I can understand that kiwis fruits, bananas and grapes need sunny climes to grow in, I recall that the other fruits were grown by my parents in our fruit and vegetable garden in the west of Ireland.

With all the land we have available, including lots of acres on setaside, surely we can replace a lot of those imports with home-grown products, thus avoiding leaving such a huge carbon footprint from transporting products across the world. – Yours, etc,

KEVIN C MURPHY,