Ms Fiona Gilligan:

I thank the committee for the opportunity to present to it. Members have a paper in front of them that contains details on a number of the resources that we have developed and sent to schools over the years. I will draw members' attention to three in particular, the first of which is MediaWise. Mr. Macey mentioned the "brand in the hand". As Dr. Foley-Nolan indicated, MediaWise teaches children media literacy and health literacy. Some of us believe that our children are tech savvy. They can Snapchat skilfully and create slo-mo videos in a second. However, they still believe what they see, particularly primary schoolchildren. MediaWise is about helping them to develop the critical and analytical skills that they need to make decisions for themselves now and later in life. Our colleagues in the Irish Heart Foundation published research on children and their ability to distinguish between content and marketing. There are major problems in that regard, which is one of the reasons for our development of this piece of work in partnership with the Irish Heart Foundation.

Another piece of research that we have done with Dr. Celine Murrin of UCD related to the ads that children watch. At three years of age, children see more than 1,000 unhealthy food ads in a year - take that to the nth degree over the years. We convened a team of experts. Social, personal and health education, SPHE, personnel were involved in the development of MediaWise, as were psychology experts like Professor Colman Noctor, the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, BAI, the Irish Heart Foundation and others. It is an eight-week programme.

It started in schools in September. More than 1,000 schools have taken it up. It tells children about emotions, persuasion and what the media is, and it is produced in a cross-curricular way in order that it covers all aspects of the curriculum. Some of the conversation has been about extending things to parents. We hope that, over the next year, we can look at how we can get that into parents' hands, as it were.

We have developed the lunchbox leaflet in partnership with Healthy Ireland and the HSE. It is the Holy Grail since it goes into parents' hands. It goes to children who are starting school every September and all schools are given copies of the leaflet. We talked about the nutritional needs of children. One third of their nutritional needs come from what is put into their lunchboxes. Parents told us in the delivery and development of a new campaign that we may refer to later that it is really helpful if they have a piece that they can point a child towards to show what they have been told they can put in the child's lunchbox. It is a really useful leaflet. There are tips in it for how to avoid soggy sandwiches and there is a lunchbox planner which is a five-day piece. We know that many complaints from parents are about what they will put in the lunchbox in following days. The leaflet is very nice.

The last item to talk about is Little Bites. A speaker earlier spoke about whether we needed to start these things at an earlier stage. This is in a child care setting where Early Childhood Ireland and Early Years, the equivalent agency in the North, are involved. I am not sure if we said that we are a North-South agency. Work that we do needs to run into the North. It is a one-stop shop for guidelines and policy for people working in the area, for menu plans and ideas for snacks. There are also lessons in how to teach children about food and how to deliver food to themselves. There are small pieces about fussy eating etc. There have been approximately 10,000 users of that to date. It has been going since 2016 and is a significant piece.