Professor Gerry Hanna:

To give a few examples of cross-Border working, in Belfast we started lung stereotactic radiotherapy back in 2012 and 2013. We had several units from the Republic do their training with us to help share that technology and that cross-Border work is really powerful. It is the same technology, the same patients, the same treatment so why would we not work together? It is very obvious. More recently, there have been programmes run here in Dublin where they delivered liver stereotactic radiotherapy which has helped train and supervise the team in Belfast. It has been a two-way process, which has been absolutely fantastic.

The Deputy specifically mentioned what we do about research and clinical trials. We are an island of seven million people but we are 5.2 million and 1.8 million and those numbers are quite critical. When you are trying to bring the next technology treatment in, a pharma company or collaborator elsewhere in the world will want to look for a big centre. They will want to look for the likes of the Royal Marsden Hospital or the Christie Hospital in Manchester. If you do not have critical mass, you simply cannot run the clinical trial.

To give an example, I was on the train this morning and the chap sitting opposite me had a brother who had finished treatment for multiple myeloma in Belfast but could not get a clinical trial here on the island of Ireland. He is travelling to Manchester every week to receive a novel trial therapy that is not available here. Ideal success would look like we would have specific trials run in Belfast, Galway and Dublin, and then we would have a network of clinical trials where we provide trials for not just 1 million or 2 million but for 7 million people. We will be much more successful if we can do that. That would lift all our boats across all our tumour sites if we could get to that point.