Leo Varadkar has said that we will have to more closely monitor thousands of seasonal workers if we let them into the country during the summer.
The Taoiseach was speaking after it emerged that Keelings in north Dublin had already flown in hundreds of workers from eastern Europe to save its strawberry crops.
Mr Varadkar was speaking at a visit to Dublin’s Civil Defence headquarters this morning.
He said that he accepted the workers qualify under the ‘essential workers’ criteria his government set.
But he said that he didn’t anticipate that it would see thousands of workers flying in to take up the jobs.
Mr Varadkar said that they will have to look at ways of getting Irish people to take up the jobs, or “let the crops fail,” or introduce stricter quarantining and monitoring of foreign workers.
He said: “Agricultural workers are deemed as essential workers because we do have to bring in the harvest in order to ensure that we have enough food to eat, so I think people understand why they are essential workers.
“Although I have to say when we deemed agricultural workers to be essential workers, I hadn’t envisaged hundreds of agricultural workers coming in from outside the country.
“So I think what we are going to try and do now is to work with the sector to see if we can find an adequate number of Irish people, or people resident in Ireland at the very least, who will take up those positions.
“And if not, we have to make a decision if we want to let the crop fail, which isn’t a good thing.
“Or do we continue to allow people to come in from other parts of the European Union, but with very defined and monitored quarantine arrangements to make sure that they don’t create a new cluster of the virus?”
The Cabinet’s coronavirus sub-committee is meeting this afternoon to discuss the matter further.
