Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for attending. I have a few brief questions to put to them. Like Deputy Shortall, I would like to see a breakdown of where the funding has been spent to date. Furnishing that to our committee would be appreciated.

During the Covid pandemic, we all became very aware of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, ECDC. It was the mother ship in terms of research and bringing us to a point where vaccination could be rolled out across the EU. The HSE is a funding partner of the ECDC. We are here to discuss a national strategy for cancer prevention. There will shortly be an EU-wide conference in Dublin on cancer control and prevention. During the pandemic, the committee became aware that the HSE was affiliated to the ECDC and it had a budget of €60 million per annum and 271 staff while its US counterpart had the equivalent of an €8 billion annual budget and 11,000 staff. We are here to discuss our national strategy, but surely there are inadequacies across Europe. During the pandemic, we saw how the EU 27 were able to work together and science and Covid prevention were advanced quickly. Surely there are inadequacies in the EU if the ECDC, an affiliate of the HSE, is underfunded and understaffed. Do the witnesses have comments to make on this point?