Dr. Paul Kavanagh:

I will add some comments specifically on tobacco. Smoking is the leading cause of ill health, preventable disease, premature mortality and health inequalities across the island of Ireland. There is a shared goal across the island of moving towards reducing that harm and ultimately bringing it to an end. While that goal is shared across the island, there are some differences in the steps being taken. If we look at one measure, namely, focusing on the age at which somebody may buy tobacco products, in Northern Ireland the plan is to establish a tobacco-free generation. This is picking an age – children born in a particular year – and as those children age progressively it will be illegal to ever sell them a tobacco product. In the South we have taken a similar focus in terms of age restriction as a way of trying to reduce the harm associated with tobacco use, but we have done that through the tobacco 21 legislation which, as the Deputy will know, has been recently enacted. There is very much a shared goal but sometimes there are differences in the steps that are being taken at a particular time towards that goal and the great opportunity is looking for shared learning so we can harness the research around those differences and the differences in impact to try to build learning and improve health across the island. One of the big opportunities there would be, as Ms Costello mentioned, the establishment of an all-Ireland public health dataset we could use to track and evaluate some of these different steps that are taken at different times with different public health issues, like tobacco, to try to gather learning and share that across the island.