Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 2 May 2018

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Children and Youth Affairs

Tackling Childhood Obesity: Discussion (Resumed)

9:30 am

Mr. Mike Neary:

I have a final comment on funding. I should acknowledge that it is only since 2009 that the European Union has provided funding, and at that early stage it was at a much lower level. We got significant funding through the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine at the time. Without that funding over the number of years, while the EU money built up, the programme would not be where it is today, so it should be acknowledged that we have secured some good funding from the Department as well and it has helped us to leverage much more money from the European Union. This is a positive.

We mentioned earlier the penetration of the programme. By the end of this school year, we will have covered almost 1 million schoolchildren, and there have been approximately 6,000 school interactions. We want to build on that, so there is a great momentum there. Obviously, the funding helps to build that further.