Dr. Cathal McCrory:

I will answer the questions in order. In terms of parents not recognising overweight or obesity in their children, I think what has happened is when one tends to get a shift to the right in BMI distribution, and that has happened at a societal level so, on average, we, as a society, are heavier now than we were ten years ago. It is also most likely that we, as a society, will be heavier again in another ten years as weight gain continues to go unchecked. As people start to gain weight they stop seeing it. If all of one's peers are moving in the same direction one just stops seeing it. As I said, 54% of parents of overweight children could not see it in their children. Let us remember that I am referring to objective measurements that used the body mass index, BMI. The parents thought their children were about the right weight. Also, of the 20% of children who were obese, their parents said they were about the right weight. That suggests that the parents did not recognise the problem in their children. Possibly, that is because one tends to find that the nutrients for children and parents correlate, for the most part. Also, overweight parents might not like to think of themselves as overweight and, therefore, might be less likely to see the same in their children. I gleaned that information from the research conducted on almost 10,000 children as part of the Growing Up in Ireland study.

In terms of breastfeeding, the economic inequalities are stark. Ireland is very bad when it comes to breastfeeding in general, and that applies right across society. We talked about the setting of targets and missing targets. In 2005, a national breastfeeding strategy was developed that sought to increase breastfeeding rates by 2% per annum and, within disadvantaged socio-economic groups, we sought to increase it by 4% per annum. Who has evaluated the success of those goals? I can tell the committee, from work conducted by Professor Anne Nolan in the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, that the increase in the incidence of breastfeeding in this country has been driven mostly by migrant mothers who are much more likely to breastfeed. By the shift to the right, in terms of the age at which mothers are having their first children, older mothers are more likely to breastfeed.