Mr. Michael Kelly:

Grow It Yourself very much welcomes the expansion of the school food programme and we think it is critical to ensure that children who need access to hot lunches, hot dinners and so on in schools are able to receive that. It is brilliant that it has moved beyond sandwiches and that sort of snacking into more substantial hot meals that are nutritious.

In Waterford, we ran a programme called Eat Together, which focused on trying to get children to sit and eat together, and develop the social skills that are often missing. Deputy Ó Cathasaigh mentioned the issue of families not sitting down to eat together as often. The pilot programme involved us sending hot lunches into the school, and we used vegetables that we had grown in the Grow It Yourself HQ in Waterford. The children sat together and had a more mindful experience of lunch. They had the proper amount of time to sit, eat and enjoy the programme together. It was much more like the way school lunches are enjoyed in French schools, and so on. We feel like the Grow It Yourself programme is complementary to the school food programme. We are very open to exploring further links there. Our big challenge at the moment is that it costs around €2,000 to deliver a school garden and all the supports that go along with that. With an ambition to reach 1,600 schools over three years, one can imagine that massive funding will be required. We have raised around €600,000 so far for the programme, mainly from philanthropy. We are asking the committee to support us in trying to get the State to step up and at least contribute to that funding. I think funding will continue to be a mix of philanthropy and corporate social responsibility, CSR, funding and so on. The State should be part of that funding mix to put food literacy at the heart of our education system.