Ms Cliona Loughnane:

The way we would think of rolling out our proposed fruit and vegetable subsidy would be around the schools, and particularly the DEIS schools, to target people who are on low incomes and are finding it difficult to buy nutritious food. It should be done that way. There is also another matter on which we have research. Professor David Madden in UCD examined the introduction of a sugar sweetened drinks tax at the level of a 10% price increase, and if a subsidy was not introduced how much it would cost to compensate the people in the poorest socio-economic groups. He found that €4 million would need to be redistributed to that group. It is quite a small amount. There are probably other ways to do that as well.