The backlash against fruit company Keelings has been slammed as "naive" by an Irish farmer.
The group has come under fire after it chartered a flight from Bulgaria carrying dozens of strawberry pickers during the Covid-19 lockdown.
The flight arrived from the Bulgarian capital Sofia on Monday, April 13 carrying what Dublin-based Keelings says are "skilled horticultural staff".
Footage of the passengers arriving to Dublin Airport emerged on social media on Thursday evening, sparking outrage.
However farmer and broadcaster Darragh McCullough blasted this backlash as "naive", and rejected claims that thousands of Irish workers could be hired to do the same job.
He told RTE Radio One: "Irish people have better employment opportunities, they're not prepared to do the hard, physical jobs that are necessary to harvest and pack food for €10 an hour.
"It just so happens that we do have a labour pool in Eastern Europe who are more than willing.
"And it's not just that they're the only people prepared to work, it's also the fact that, in my case on my farm, they have been coming every year for the last ten years.
"They've developed the skills to be able to work fast and efficiently and do it to a certain spec.
"To train somebody up off the street, so to speak, it could take 6 months before they're actually into their stride and at the same level as the people we have been employing for years.
"So I think it's a bit naive to suggest we can suddenly turn around and employ hundreds if not thousands of willing Irish people to do the same work."
And journalist Suzanne Campbell agreed that these workers are "essential" to food production in Ireland.
She added: "We mostly get our seasonal labour for the crop from Romania and Bulgaria.
"Over the season it was estimated this year we would need about 1,500 seasonal workers to come in.
"I reported from one strawberry farm last year at the end of the season in Wexford, and the scale of these farms is huge, the amount of labour they use, that farm alone had 150 people mainly from Romania and Moldova.
"And they really are essential to picking these foods in Ireland. We wouldn't have strawberries, particularly soft fruits, on the shelf without these people.
"Normally they're coming in at the beginning of the season now to help produce strawberries and raspberries, also broccoli, and even iceberg lettuce towards the end of the summer."
However Fianna Fail TD Paul McAuliffe rejected suggestions that the workers should have travelled here in the midst of a pandemic.
He said: "Dublin is an open and welcoming city to migrant workers and they are, particularly in the north county, very important.
"But it's not about that, it's not about any of those issues, it's about the way we are dealing with this pandemic."
