Professor Mark Lawler:

To remind members, part of the work of the Good Friday Agreement led to the development of an Ireland-Northern Ireland-National Cancer Institute Cancer Consortium, and we have had supreme benefits from that over the last 20 to 25 years. In Belfast this April, as part of the overall 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, we will be running a special cancer showcase, and I can tell the members that we already have their emails on a list and we are going to invite them all to that event. It will take place in Queen's University Belfast on the afternoon of Tuesday, 18 April. We see this initiative as really important in terms of how we work together.

By bringing together the best minds on the island of Ireland, we can be really good and really successful, and we can drive the research agenda. Combining that with the US National Cancer Institute, we can be unbeatable. We can lead the world. That is the initiative we have focused on. As Professor Gallagher will tell members, what we are now doing is a number of events in the US to look at how we can work together, particularly with the Irish diaspora in the United States, but also with the US National Cancer Institute. For example, we are co-hosting an event in the US National Cancer Institute, which is one of the best cancer institutes in the world, on 13 March. That is right in the back yard of American cancer research, and we are co-hosting an event there. We have seven students who are currently doing PhDs at the US National Cancer Institute, and we will be showcasing their work.

That is just an example of why we work with the US. We obviously collaborate with a lot of people around the world, but this is special. To remember Paddy Johnston again, Paddy used to work at the National Cancer Institute. He came back to Ireland, and he had an idea of bringing Ireland, Northern Ireland and the US National Cancer Institute closer together, because we could achieve much more than the sum of our parts.