Dr. Darrin Morrissey:

Deputy Durkan's question in the context of education was very good. It is very important to educate the population and the healthcare professional community on the importance of prevention. In collaboration with the National Cancer Institute in the US, we co-fund a series of fellowships in cancer prevention as well as courses in Bethesda for medics and allied healthcare professionals. Hundreds of those courses have been taken up. These are the things we engage in which are important.

Deputy Donnelly used the term "primary research". The term we would use is basic biomedical research and the question is where that fits within the HRB brief. There is no doubt that during what I will euphemistically call the austerity years, the focus for the Department of Health and the HRB definitely shifted towards the more applied end of research. That is a matter of fact. We have moved increasingly away from funding basic research. However, there is still a place in our portfolio for basic biomedical research. Currently, out of a revenue stream of approximately €35 million, in the region of €2 million is dedicated to basic biomedical. That is across all disease areas, not for cancer necessarily. We would have to examine the specific cancer data for that.