Hildegarde Naughton (Galway West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister and thank the Chair for his questions.

As regards obesity, from a prevention point of view, Healthy Ireland was established in 2017 and its budget was €5 million. Today, in budget 2024, it is in excess of €16 million, so there is a big emphasis on this. We have many public engagement campaigns on obesity. One is the Healthy Weight campaign. It was rolled out in 2022-23. After every campaign, research is done on the impact it has in raising awareness. The Healthy Weight campaign used a novel approach in targeting 24- to 34-year-olds specifically and focusing on the impact of managing your weight in that period of your life and what that does for the rest of your life. It seeks to do away with some of the easy myths and the advice of simply eating less and exercising more. There are far more areas we need to look at to make sure we all manage our weight, such as the importance of getting sleep and the importance of managing stress. We have behavioural science communicators as part of that campaign on social media. After the campaign was run, post-campaign research showed that 81% of young people found those ads clearly communicated their messages. We then had a second campaign which was run late last year and which was expanded to include radio. Further research is being carried out now to inform us of any changes around those campaigns.

Healthy eating feeds into particular areas throughout the country. I secured an additional €300,000 to facilitate the recruitment of four community food and nutrition workers, which will bring the national complement to 19. Those workers are vital, going into local communities and developing responses to food poverty and insecurity.

Also, the roll-out of our walking trails through the GAA was a huge success. It was oversubscribed with GAA walking trails. In budget 2024, I have secured further funding for that as well as outdoor swimming activities.

That is just a quick overview of what is happening in the area of prevention.