Robbie Gallagher (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the delegates and thank them for their informative presentations. As colleagues noted, when it comes to healthy living habits, problems often begin before children arrive in school. As well as educating children, we also must educate their parents. That is a particular challenge we face in this area. Children are only at school for X number of hours a day and it may be too late to correct things if problems are already apparent at the age of four or five years. We have serious work to do in educating parents. After all, it is they who are mostly responsible for feeding their children. When I was in school, PE was considered more or less to be a free class in which one could mess around. For the benefit of society as a whole, we must move towards a situation where physical education and nutrition are core subjects in primary and secondary schools. Part of the difficulty for overweight children, apart from the impact on physical health, is the psychological damage that may be caused. As other speakers noted, that damage can carry through into adulthood. An increase in obesity levels brings problems for society as a whole. Until PE and nutrition are core subjects, we are only tackling the fringes of the problem. Will Mr. Ward, in particular, comment on this?

I am very impressed by the successes the two delegates from Armagh have achieved with their initiative. As a person who lives in Monaghan, I am not surprised to discover that they are leading lights in the world of physicality, given what the Armagh football team has done in the past 20 years. I might talk to them after the meeting to learn more about what they are doing. There is serious potential in the initiative.

Will Ms Heneghan comment specifically on the issue of costs? As we know, everything boils down to the euro and it is something we cannot avoid. The Minister has noted that vending machines are often a source of funding for schools, some of which would not survive without the revenue the machines provide. That is a sad reflection on where we are. The existence of vending machines in schools is not really the problem but rather what items they contain. Funding is a key issue in all of these matters.

If they will excuse the pun, the delegates have given us serious food for thought. It is now a question of how we can take advantage of all the information in a joined-up way in order to devise a policy for the future.