Professor Mark Lawler:

I thank Dr. Farry for the question. His previous involvement in health has been relevant in this regard. We need to think North-South but also east-west. There is a significant opportunity, particularly when the comprehensive spending review finally happens in the UK, in regard to opportunities there, both on an all-island basis but also from that east-west perspective. We see this as being a significant opportunity in regard to ways in which the shared island unit can contribute. The Taoiseach visited us in Queen’s last week and one of the things we talked about specifically was how we can leverage this for something like cancer, which affects us all. Certainly, partnership in Europe is something we have done a lot of in the past, as Professor Gallagher said, and I think we have significant opportunities. It is very important to us, or certainly an advantage to us in a way, that cancer is the only health mission in the EU missions, in that five missions are identified but the only one related to health is cancer Therefore, we have the opportunity and working together is going to make us better than the sum of our parts.

On Dr. Farry’s other question, the opportunity of the city deals and what that is going to drive in innovation is very significant. Part of that will be how we deal with data, which was a question asked earlier. That is a conversation we need to have. Sean O'Neill, who is the chief reporter for The Times, wrote an article two months ago where he said that we get the data and statistics every day for Covid and asked why we cannot get the same for cancer. I would ask the same question. If we had data every day on cancer, we would have much better opportunities to drive the research agenda and use it to influence how we treat our patients. There is no technical reason we cannot have it, so we need to work together to look at the barriers we need to overcome to make that a reality. There are examples where we have worked together in the context of Covid and cancer and where we have been able to bring together eight different bodies, all of them contributing their datasets. I hate people who silo their data; it should be a criminal offence. It is the public who are providing the data in many cases through the hospitals and the patients and, therefore, that data should be available to allow us to make rational decisions in regard to the care of our patients and our citizens.