Ms Grace O'Malley:

I would, yes. We need to incentivise the consumption of healthy foods. It depends on where one lives in the country but a bottle of Coke in, say, a shop in inner city Dublin will be far cheaper than a bottle of water. If one wants to buy vegetables they will be far more expensive than a big bag of crisps and if one's children are hungry, one will give them something that is just calories to ensure they are not hungry. That is a problem because it leads to the creation of chronic disease.

We must be serious about front of label packaging. We can look to the United Kingdom for evidence of that, and we know that traffic light labelling works. I worked for a period with stroke rehabilitation and people who are rehabilitating, particularly those who are morbidly obese, must believe that they can change before they change but many of our clients who are morbidly obese have pain. They have biomechanical reasons they cannot exercise and therefore we need to encourage and help them.

With regard to the top five issues, from my point of view we have to look at treatment and prevention. First, we have to train people on the ground who want to be able to work in this area. We have general practitioners and practice nurses in place already but there is no training for them. That must be addressed. Second, we need to treat children who are obese because they will become adults who are obese. Third, we must regulate the food environment in terms of the advertising of non-nutritious foods. We must incentivise the consumption of healthy foods. Fourth, we need to seriously examine education and make sure that physical education is on the curriculum and that it is mandatory. Cooking skills should be on the curriculum to ensure that our children, the next generation, know how to cook for themselves. We are amazed that many parents do not know how to cook.