Ms Suzanne Costello:

That is a really good question; I am glad the Deputy has asked it. There are a number of things. To take them in sequence, the first is that, without being an expert on the Good Friday Agreement, there is enormous scope for health within the agreement. To date, it has been a mixture of the great work the implementation bodies are doing. There is some excellent work going on around the healthcare agreements, as we have spoken to. The big change between 1998 and now is the fact that the public health challenges have moved beyond health protection, which was a huge emphasis in those days, into the social and the commercial determinants of health. They are the same in every country - in Northern Ireland, Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales. There is therefore so much more to be gained from working in co-operation. What that would look like in reality is opportunities for shared research budgets and shared public information campaigns.

One of the suggestions we have - it is aspirational - is that we would like to see consideration of an all-island centre for tobacco and alcohol research. Both departments of health face exactly the same problems. They both deal with them through tobacco and alcohol units. We do not have a dedicated research strand around tobacco and alcohol. Those two things alone are responsible for a huge amount of harm at population level.

We would be looking then on practical levels of things. Dr. Mack, as the Deputy will know from the statement, is involved in specialist training for public health doctors. We would like to see more alignment between the training North and South, perhaps. The whole issue for people working in public health is to understand that interface on both a human level and a policy level at the Border area. That can be done through training, research and practical engagement. We would definitely like to see that. As a mature North-South agency and not an implementation body, we, like colleagues, and there are many agencies like ours, feel that we probably would like to have a role to use our experience as the shared island initiative develops. We have been doing this for many years, as have colleagues in other agencies, and we are delighted to see more people coming into the field and the impetus, engagement and energies around this now. We are very experienced in that area and we would like to become more formally engaged in that and perhaps see a framework set up under that umbrella that deals with agencies that have been doing this work for a long time. There are specific areas within challenges around governance, which is possibly not as well formed as it is for the implementation bodies. We have had extensive conversations with the co-secretaries of the NSMC, who have been enormously supportive and encouraging in looking at that work. That is a work in progress.