Dr. Norah Campbell:

There is a lot in those amazing questions; the Deputy and Senator can come and do my job here if they wish. We need to look historically at this and ask if anything less than a ban has worked to reduce or even stabilise obesity and overweight figures. We need to use the evidence over 30 years to come to the sad and difficult conclusion that any other way outside an outright ban has not worked. The obesity figures have gone up by one third over the 30 years that successive Governments have been trying to grapple with the issue.

I do not want to take up too much of other people's time, but it is important to understand that advertising online is not information. Advertising online is not about telling people about how much fat a particular bag of crisps contains or how many grams of sugar are in something else. Advertising is used as a social glue to bring young people together. It is entertaining, interactive and immersive. The terms the Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland has just used that those ads need to be decent, honest, legal and truthful are the wrong terms to describe something completely different today, which is entertainment.

The British regulatory authority, Ofcom, found that children were exposed to 15.1 billion impressions of unhealthy food online in 2019. I do not believe we would ever be able to create a monitoring service that would be able to encompass even a fraction of 15.1 billion impressions. The only way I could envisage doing it would be through an outright ban of this entire food type online.