Mr. Tony Fitzgerald:

I thank the Cathaoirleach. I want to make the point of putting public health on the agenda for local authorities. It is an important point about what we want to do to develop local communities, cities, counties, towns and villages. One of the key factors for us in Cork city, as I said earlier, was to include health as a priority across the city and development plan. There has been a lot of discussion today on SPCs. My colleagues and I made a submission on each of the actions of the health and safety committee. We put the plan before every SPC then took it to corporate policy level, then before the council. It had been through all of the elected members and had also been before the external members who participated in the SPC.

If you put health at the heart of what you want to do in your local authority, then you will have a platform for other initiatives across environment, infrastructure, roads and housing, because that is key to where we want to be. It addresses mental health, health at work and early intervention for children. There is a golden opportunity in the aftermath of the local elections in June to have an elected representative from every local authority forming a healthy cities and counties committee, because that is absent here in Ireland while it is strong at local level elsewhere. It requires political will. I would be happy to facilitate any of that in the future because Ireland is seen by the WHO as one of the leading models of political intervention for health and well-being. If you look back at what we did during the Covid pandemic, making sure that meals on wheels were delivered, the gardaí looked after prescriptions for people and so on when people were cocooned, healthy cities and counties is very simple. It is about what is happening with health in a local community, whether a community garden or slí na sláinte. They are all part of health and wellbeing. This is not something new but needs to be key to what we develop.