Professor Mark Lawler:

I will answer the first question and thank Deputy Conway-Walsh for remembering Professor Johnson. I remember him every day as he was a friend, colleague and mentor. He was my mentor for the past 25 years and I thank the Deputy for mentioning him. We all miss him and we hope this is a legacy we can leave for him.

I will respond to the first question on the impact of Covid on cancer services and cancer patients. I lead a European initiative that looks at the impact, which is where that figure of 1 million cancer cases came from. We conducted a very detailed analysis right across Europe, which showed that 100 million screening tests were not performed, so 1 million cancer diagnoses may have been missed. To be perfectly honest, that is a really scary figure. One of the things we need to do is look at ways in which we can increase the effort to reduce the backlog, which is what we have advocated for both in the European Cancer Organisation and within AICRI in terms of the work we have done. This research will lead to impact and now it is quoted, for example, by Stella Kyriakides, who is the European Commissioner for Health and Food Safety. These data have also been quoted by the European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen.

We believe research is the way to address this issue. I mean research into ways we can diagnose earlier because that is one the problems that we face now. We face a problem because the Covid pandemic and national lockdowns have caused the disease to progress to a later stage. To address that we need to look at ways in which we can quickly reduce the backlog, which will not happen overnight. This is potentially a cancer crisis if we do not do something about the backlog now, which we have articulated. In fact, we produced our report last month, which is a study that was commissioned by The Lancet Oncology. One of our key asks is that we need to have real-time data that allow us to see what the problem is and then to use that intelligence to address the problem.

I thank the Deputy for her question. It is very much in the area where we want to focus on something that can really make a difference to patients. The work has been rewarded with the European Communiqué award for the use of data in society. The data are hot off the presses, topical and what we need to do.