Ms Kate O'Flaherty:

I will take the specific questions. Hopefully, I have recorded all of them. The current vending policy that the Department of Education and Skills has supported is the one that is currently running in the HSE. It is to make a start to move to a 60:40 split in terms of healthy and less healthy products, and to give that choice. A key part in starting in that way in secondary schools was to align with the whole well-being curriculum and helping young people to make decisions for themselves. The school councils are involved in that. That is where we are at the moment but that will be reviewed in the future in terms of whether we need to move that further.

On the sugar tax, we have said that the Department of Finance's tax policy is not to hypothecate a tax per se. Colleagues have referred to the narrative hypothecation and it is a very nice phrase in that we are not actually hypothecating it but are being seen to give money towards something. In terms of our new Healthy Ireland fund, there is some element of that, that is, to help promote and leverage cross-sectoral working at national and local levels.

I refer to school meal standards. Currently, school meals are funded thorough the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection and the funding has increased. The new standards will be monitored by it. It is setting up a more robust system where it is signing service level agreements, SLAs, with all schools that sign up to the programme. That will be written into the SLAs, so that the schools must comply with the standards. The Department of Health will also liaise with some of the main providers of the school meals to ensure it is done as efficiently as possible. There is no excuse for any child in any school, particularly if it is State subsidised, not to be able to have food that matches the food pyramid. Some of the monitoring and evaluation will be done by Dr. Murrin and by colleagues to see the impact of that.

We have an agreement in principle in terms of how we encourage schools that are outside the school meals programme to start to use those standards in the context of the provision of other foods and meals in schools that are not necessarily State subsidised and to try to have that consistency among schools as standard.

My colleagues in safefood have probably given the members a little bit of a sneak preview into the new campaign. We have our own policy framework and it is good to reference the child policy framework, Better Outcomes, Brighter Futures: The National Policy Framework for Children & Young People 2014-2020, which this committee will be familiar with, in terms of supporting parents. While children are in school settings, most children grow up in families so it is really about supporting the parents and making healthier choices and behaviours. How do we support parents so that becomes normalised across eating and activity? It is the approach we take in terms of smoking, alcohol and so on. How do we make it easier for people to make those healthier choices and for that to be the norm?

We probably did not elucidate it enough but we have a number of cross-sectoral groups and very good working relationships with a number of Departments. We have an overall cross-sectoral structure for Healthy Ireland but then we have a group for the obesity policy and the physical activity plan. It was remiss of me not to say that we that we developed and implement the physical activity plan jointly with our colleagues in the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport.Active transport is a key part of that and we will be looking to continue to build on that. Under that, at population level, we launched a new Get Ireland Walking strategy, so there is a piece in that around how we join the dots in terms of good infrastructure, encouraging schools and encouraging parents to leave the car at home and walk to the school if they live less than a kilometre away. Some schools are taking that on board.

We will also be working on a new Get Ireland Cycling strategy which would go hand-in-hand with that. How do we make it easier for people? How do we normalise it? Over time, more people will seek to move to change their behaviour because more people around them are now doing that. That is certainly there in terms of the overall piece.

Finally, I have to respond to Senator Gallagher's remark. I will take it as a compliment that the focus on strategic communications is starting to filter down to the Department of Health. They are very quick answers to the questions that members raised but if they would like any further information, we would be happy to respond in writing. I thank the committee for the opportunity to be here.