Ms Suzanne Costello:

Naturally we are going to say we have been very effective since our establishment in 1998. One of the things we can really stand over is that when the institute was established, its core focus, which remains today, was to address health inequalities. At that time health inequalities was sort of a niche interest but members will be very familiar with the fact that now health inequalities is woven through all public policy. There is a wide recognition of the issue of health inequalities and health equity and the holistic measures we need to take to address that. That is probably the outstanding achievement of IPH but having said that an awful lot more work needs to be done because new challenges have come along as society has modernised and changed and globalisation has come in. While we have achieved a lot, we still have many challenges ahead.

On the alignment of policies, which the Deputy referred to, on tobacco, MUP and the pandemic, I will ask my colleague Dr. Kavanagh to speak about the differences between tobacco control policy in the UK and Ireland. MUP is a very good example. Efforts have been made between the two jurisdictions, which both have health improvement strategies. We have Healthy Ireland and in Northern Ireland there is Making Life Better. All western European countries have health improvement strategies because health improvement and building a flourishing and healthy population is so important with respect to all sorts of different societal issues. While we do not make policy on an all-island basis, there are many things we can do in alignment, and MUP and tobacco control are very good examples of that. The intention with minimum unit pricing was to implement it in parallel to deal with some of the issues that arise from different policies at different times. That was not achieved and has not been achieved, but we are very close to it and the intention is certainly there to move in that direction. Of course, MUP is a policy that has not only been implemented in Ireland and Northern Ireland but also in Scotland and Wales, so across these islands it is being implemented at different times and we are all learning from one another at the different stages of implementation and how we are approaching it.